A Hard Kind of Freedom: Enslaved Women, Reproductive Resistance, and Infanticide

Enslaved women’s reproduction has long been a topic of interest among historians. Building on the work of scholars including Darlene Clark Hine, Thelma Jennings, and Jennifer Morgan, this paper examines bondswomen’s unique capacity to resist enslavement through their ability to manipulate their own reproduction by the pre-partum use of preventives and abortifacients and the post-partum act of infanticide. Although infanticide occurred across racial, social, and economic boundaries, this paper argues that among enslaved women these acts of maternal violence bear a particular meaning. First, in interfering with their own reproduction, bondswomen challenged the slaveholder’s authority and control over their bodies and second, they deprived slaveholders of the future benefit of enslaved property. In considering infanticide as a means of reproductive resistance, this paper analyzes the violent nature of these acts and uses violence as a lens through which to examine enslaved women and their lives. What does the degree of violence and the method employed to commit infanticide reveal about the interiority of enslaved women’s lives? Can we view the actions of an enslaved mother who used a stone to strike and beat her newborn to death in the same way that another mother smothered her child or used arsenic to claim her infant’s life? As an act of resistance infanticide might reflect an enslaved mother’s love, fear, utter desperation, or derangement—therefore the degree of violence inflicted in the execution of the act might reveal important insights into enslaved women’s lives and minds.