Resisting Reproduction: Reconsidering Slave Contraception in the Old South

Journal of American Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 255-274

  Perrin, Liese M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 85012448464     PISSN: 00218758     EISSN: 14695154     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875801006612     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave : A Composite Autobiography, Vols. 2-41 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972-1979).
2. Liese M. Perrin, “ Slave Women and Work in the American South” (University of Birmingham: Ph.D. diss., 1999).
3. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “ Strategies and Forms of Resistance: Focus on Slave Women in the United States “, in Gray Y. Okihiro, ed., In Resistance : Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American History (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 143-65, 158.
4. Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels : A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1989), 158.
5. Deborah Gray White, Ar'n ‘t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 84.
6. Jessie M. Rodrique, “The Black Community and the Birth Control Movement” in Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed, eds., We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible (New York: Carlson Publishing, Inc., 1995), 505-20.
7. Richard H. Steckel, “Women, Work, and Health under Plantation Slavery in the United States,” in David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More than Chattel : Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 1996), 43-60.
8. Cheryll Ann Cody, “ Cycles of Work and of Childbearing” in David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine eds., More than Chattel : Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 1996), 61-78. Cody concentrates on how different types of work and the time of year affect the pregnancy and childbirth patterns of slave women. While she does briefly discuss some of the other factors which may have influenced these patterns, she does not mention birthcontrol.
9. Cheryll Ann Cody, “ Slave Demography and Family Formation: A Community Study of the Ball Family Plantations, 1720-1896” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1982), 198.
10. For example, see : B. E. Finch and H. Green, Contraception Through the Ages (London: Peter Owen, 1963) Angus McLaren, A History of Contraception from Antiquity to the Present Day (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990) John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
11. McLaren, A History of Contraception.
12. Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (London: Currey, 1990).
13. Barbara Bush, “Hard Labor: Women, Childbirth, and Resistance in British Caribbean Slave Societies ” in David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More than Chattel : Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 1996), 193-217, 204.
14. Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 148.
15. Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Pantheon, 1976), note, 80-82.
16. Lu Lee, interviewed in Rawick, ed., Texas Narr., Supplement, series 2, Vol. 6 (part 5), 2299.
17. William Byrd, interviewed in Rawick, ed., Texas Narr., Supplement, series 2, Vol. 3 (part 2), 568.
18. William Coleman, interviewed in Rawick, ed., Texas Narr., Supplement, series 2, Vol. 3 (part 2), 875.
19. Anna Lee, interviewed in Rawick, ed., Texas Narr., Supplement, series 2, Vol. 6 (part 5), 2284.
20. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow : Black Women, Work and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 19. Jones says : “At the regional level, a decline in slave fertility and increase in miscarriage rates during the cotton boom years of 1830 to 1860 reveals the heightened demands made upon women, both in terms of increased workloads in the fields and family break-ups associated with the massive, forced migration of slaves from the Upper to the Lower South.”
21. Mary Gaffney, interviewed in Rawick, ed., Texas Narr., Supplement, series 2, Vol. 5 (part 4), 1453.
22. Campbell et al., Journal of American Chemistry Society, 59 (1937), 1723-26.
23. “Cottonseed contraceptive update” Science News (July 28 1984), 60.
24. See, for example: K. Ratsula, M. Haukkamma, K. Wichmann, T. Luukkainen, “Vaginal Contraception with Gossypol: a Clinical Study,” Contraception, 27:6 (1983), 571-76.
25. Sarah Shaw Graves, interviewed in Rawick, ed., Missouri Narr., series 2, Vol. 11, 129.
26. See Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves : Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 163-69 for a discussion regarding the effect of forcible separations on slaves.
27. Virginia Yarbrough, interviewed in Rawick, ed., Texas Narr., Supplement, series 2, Vol. 10 (part 9), 4295-96.
28. Frank Fikes, interviewed in Rawick, ed., Arkansas Narr., series 2, Vol. 8 (part 2), 283.
29. Davison McDowell, Plantation Journal, 1815-1833, South Carolina Library (SCL), University of South Carolina.
30. Journal of American Chemistry Society.
31. See: Todd L. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery : The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978).
32. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, note, 80-82.
33. Joseph Palmer, Account Book, 1832-1935, [typed transcript], SCL.
34. Concise Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 254.
35. Concise Oxford English Dictionary., 160, 31.
36. Kenneth F. Kiple and Virginia H. Kiple, “ Slave Child Mortality : Some Nutritional Answers to a Perennial Puzzle,” Journal of Social History, 10 (March 1977), 284-309. This article explains that deficiencies in the slave mother's diet would have led to deficiencies in the nutrition available to developing foetuses, and in the breast milk after birth : “Some slave babies then must have entered the world with serious mineral deficiencies ” (288). This implies that, if the diet of slave mothers was very poor, their pregnancies might not reach full term. The loss of infants through poor nutrition would be one factor influencing the length of birth spacing. See also John Campbell, “Work, Pregnancy, and Infant Mortality among Southern Slaves,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 14:4 (1984), 793-812.
37. See, for example, Patricia Malone, Sweet Chariot (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 175-79.
38. Rawick, ed., Georgia Narr., series 2, Vol. 13 (part 4), 332.
39. Gus Feaster, interviewed in Rawick, ed., S. C. Narr., series 1, Vol. 2. (part 2), 68.
40. Rube Montgomery, interviewed in Rawick, ed., Miss. Narr., Supplement, series 1, Vol.
41. (part 4), 1561.
42. Mary J. Houston, “ Breast Feeding, Fertility and Child Health: A Review of International Issues ” Journal of Advanced Nursing, 11 (1986), 35-40. Houston explains that the key to the contraceptive effect of lactation lies in the suppression of ovulation. She suggests that, “The more often the mother suckles, the more likely she is not to ovulate. A minimum of six feeds a day would seem to be necessary from present studies ” (37). It is well documented that, especially in the latter half of the year in which slave mothers nursed their children, breast-feeding only occurred once or twice during the day with perhaps one feed at night. Thus, slave women were probably not feeding regularly enough or for long enough for lactation to have any significant contraceptive effect. In a critique of Fogel and Engerman's Time on the Cross, Paul David and Peter Temin suggest that a 24-30 month gap between births does not necessarily mean that slave women breast fed for a year. They argue that this assumption, “ rests on the empirical validity of three premises which the authors have left unstated and therefore unexamined. Were it established that the slaves were not practicing contraception, and were it also the case that slave couples enjoyed regular and frequent intercourse throughout the woman's mid-month, and were there no basis for suspecting a prolonged sequence of postpartum anovulatory cycles, then an inference of an extended interval of amenorrhea induced by continuing lactation would be rather compelling” (Paul A. David; Peter Temin, “ Capitalist Masters, Bourgeois Slaves ” in Paul A. David, Herbert G. Gutman, Richard Sutch, Peter Temin, and Gavin Wright, eds., Reckoning with Slavery : A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 33-54, p. 50.
43. In each of the cases studied, there was a small number of birth spacings (1-4 spacings in each case) which were abnormally long, and which skewed the mean averages between births slightly. The figures in Tables 1, 2 and 3 illustrate the average spacing between births. Column 3 includes all data, while column 4 excludes spacings over 60 months. These longer spacings could be explained by a number of causes. It may have been that there were unrecorded miscarriages or stillbirths between the births. Poor diet or a heavy work regime might also have led to temporary infertility. Illness after a birth may also have led to a longer period between births. Another explanation is that a partner may have died or been sold away, leading to a period of celibacy. A few mothers may have aborted their children, or used some form of contraception. Cheryll Ann Cody refers very briefly to this possibility in her discussion of longer birth spacings on the Ball Family Plantations, but does not regard it as a likely explanation. See: Cody “ Slave Demography and Family Formation,” 198.
44. Malone, Sweet Chariot, 177-78.
45. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 137.
46. Thus reducing the chance that long spaces between births might be due to poor record keeping.
47. See discussion of the limits to the contraceptive effect of lactation in Cody, “ Slave Demography and Family Formation,” 172, and also Houston, “ Breast Feeding, Fertility and Child Health,” 35-40.
48. Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 139.
49. See White, Ar'n ‘t I a Woman?, 88-89, and also Michael P. Johnson, “Smothered Slave Infants : Were Slave Mothers at Fault ?” Journal of Southern History, 47:4 (1981), 493-520 for a discussion of sids among slave infants.
50. However, in cases where infanticide did occur, evidence does suggest that slave women often committed this act as a form of resistance, as Tony Morrison suggests in her dramatisation of slave infanticide, Beloved (London: Vintage, 1997 [originally published 1987]).
51. Norrece T. Jones, Jr., Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave : Mechanisms of Control and Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1990), 61.
52. Anna Lee, interviewed in Rawick, ed., Texas Narr., Supplement, series 2, Vol. 6 (part 5), 2284.