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WiSe 20/21: On Care Work: Black Midwifery and a History of Science, 1619 to 1877

Helen Gibson

Information for students

In-person teaching: only students registered on Campus Management can participate

Comments

The history of Black subjectivity in the colonial Americas is a history of women’s reproductive lives and labors; the commodification of Black women’s wombs was the essence of the logic of Atlantic slavery (Morgan 2004, 2018). Historians of slavery in the colonial Americas have written of infanticide, and of abortion (Hartman 2016). Yet Black midwifery in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries is a subject that has received scant historical attention. Tanya Hart writes in Health in the City: Race, Poverty, and the Negotiation of Women’s Health in New York City, 1915-1930 that Black women delivered most babies, Black and white, in the antebellum South. How and under what circumstances did these midwives work? What was their relationship to the burgeoning white medical establishment? What means of affirming Black life and confronting pain did midwives offer? What gendered realities did the labor of ‘free’ and enslaved midwives help create? One of the lingering effects of the commodification of Black women’s wombs under slavery has been a disparity between women’s self-reporting of pain and the perception of pain thresholds for Black female patients by non-Black doctors (Owens and Fett 2019). The subject of midwifery speaks not only to cultural practices of historical, gendered subjectivity for Black women, but also to the contemporary relationship of Black women in the United States to medical communities at large. The year 1619 has long signified the arrival of women from Africa in the colonial Americas. The year 1877 is known as the end of the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War, and will allow for investigation of midwifery practices by women both ‘free’ and enslaved before and after the institution of slavery in the United States was legally abolished. A methodological focus on care work will bring together current theorizing in the fields of Black feminist studies and disability studies as well as a history of enslavement and a history of science, placing historiographically elusive female protagonists at the center of the narrative. Works Cited: Hart, Tanya. Health in the City: Race, Poverty, and the Negotiation of Women’s Health in New York City, 1915-1930. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Hartman, Saidiya. “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors.” Souls 18, no. 1 (2016): 166-173. Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. “Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 22, no. 1 (2018): 1-17. Owens, Deidre Cooper and Sharla M. Fett. “Black Maternal and Infant Health: Historical Legacies of Slavery.” American Journal of Public Health 109, no. 10 (2019): 1342–1345. close

15 Class schedule

Regular appointments

Wed, 12:00 - 14:00 15 Class schedule

Wed, 2020-11-04 12:00 - 14:00

Lecturers:
Helen Gibson