Birthing a Slave - Softcover

Schwartz, Marie Jenkins

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674034929 ISBN 13: 9780674034921

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Synopsis

Describes the competing approaches to reproductive health that evolved on plantations, as both black women and white men sought to enhance the health of enslaved mothers. This book focuses on the health care of enslaved women, and argues for the critical role of reproductive medicine in the slave system of antebellum America.

About this title

Review:

This is a good book, well researched, and filled with useful information.--John S. Haller"American Historical Review" (04/01/2007)

This study adds much to our understanding of obstetrical and gynecological practices on slave women and the complexities and impersonality of the master-slave relationship.--Steven Case"North Carolina Historical Review" (10/01/2006)

Schwartz puts slave births in the medical and social context of the times while looking at childbearing through the eyes of physicians, slaveowners, overseers, and bondwomen. This "slavery and obstetrics" book will be a valuable and most readable resource for scholars and students.--Todd L. Savitt, Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University

A fascinating history of reproductive medicine in the antebellum southern slave system when black women struggled to control pregnancy and childbirth on their own terms. Schwartz clearly and convincingly reveals the role of laboring black women--both as workers and as reproducers of the enslaved work force--as central to the American slave system.--Jacqueline Jones, author of Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women Workers and the Family from Slavery to the Present

Birthing a Slave gives us a ground-level view of medicine, gender, and doctor-patient relationships under the slave system in the U.S. South. Deeply researched and engagingly written, Schwartz's book is sure to become not only an essential work in our understanding of health care in the antebellum South, but also of the wider society that framed the values defining health and sickness.--Steven M. Stowe, author of Doctoring the South: Southern Physicians and Everyday Medicine in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Compellingly argued and beautifully written, this book is a major contribution to women's history, the study of slavery, and the history of gynecology and obstetrics. Rich and remarkably well-researched, Birthing a Slave shows how struggles over reproduction, sexuality, and mothering are central to an understanding of slavery.--Steven Mintz, author of Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood

An impressive blend of medical and social history exposing the vested interests of southern slave society in the reproductive health of African American bondwomen. Schwartz's meticulous research illuminates health issues--such as cancer, infertility, and menstruation--that have received little to no attention elsewhere in scholarship on medicine and slavery.--Sharla Fett, author of Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations

This remarkably researched and thorough book on pregnancy and childbirth among enslaved African-Americans demonstrates how the most personal and intimate aspects of slaves' lives were fraught with politics and power. Schwartz, whose previous work Born in Bondage explored the lives of children under slavery, draws upon medical records, journals, letters, and WPA interviews to recreate a slave's progression from conception to birth. Her access into this intimate world is stunning, and she provides rich, challenging accounts. She contends that planters and doctors used "biological science and learning to uphold power relations in the South," and indicts doctors for their complicity in white brutality on black women's bodies. In turn, black women used resistance tactics that ranged from birth control to midwifery in a struggle for control over their bodies and children...The narratives Schwartz weaves create a vivid, highly detailed portrait of women's lives under slavery, in turns that are both chilling (the casual brutality of slave-owners) and awe-inspiring (the strength and bravery of the enslaved).-- (05/22/2006)

Birthing a Slave is exhaustively researched, engagingly written, and persuasively argued, and it skillfully blends social and medical history. The volume is a major contribution to the literature of slavery, and it will have a wide appeal and enrich the work of a variety of scholars, especially those interested in the South and slavery, health and medicine, and women.-- (03/01/2007)

As Schwartz convincingly demonstrates, the history of reproductive health touches upon nearly every debate that has dominated slavery studies over the past seven decades: resistance and agency, hegemony, paternalism, family, culture, and religion. For its historiographical reach, analytical breadth, and archival depth, Birthing a Slave will be of great interest to scholars of African American history, southern history, women's history, and the history of medicine. This book is impeccably researched and beautifully written. Schwartz has admirably tackled a sensitive subject with analytical grace and narrative skill. While it may not be the right book to savor over a morning coffee, Birthing a Slave is social history at its finest.-- (01/01/2007)

About the Author:

Marie Jenkins Schwartz is Associate Professor of History at the University of Rhode Island.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• ISBN 10: 0674034929
• ISBN 13: 9780674034921
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416