Mothering the South
Open Access DepositedGender, Race, and Antebellum Slavery
In the antebellum South, the care of infants fundamentally shaped the lives and labors of Black and white women. This project explores the significance of this care in the slaveholding Southern household and in the scientific, political, and cultural landscape from 1830-1865. I define “mothering” as women’s physical care for infants, including breastfeeding and medical care, along with the perceived emotional features of this care, like nurture and maternal instinct. Demands of infant care on Southern farms and plantations implicated slaveholding and enslaved women and children in a complex system of labor defined by exploitation and violence. This project also identifies the prevalence of cultural, scientific, and political discourses and depictions of mothering in the antebellum United States. Physicians, activists, ideologues, and authors regularly articulated ideas about enslaved and slaveholding women’s respective capacities for mothering. This project argues that these representations of mothering, along with the quotidian structures of mothering, reinforced ideological notions of racial difference between Black and white womanhood. Perceived racial differences in capacities for mothering – like Black women’s supposed neglect of their children, and white women’s “superior” motherliness – reinforced the racial and economic inferiority of Black womanhood to white womanhood. These discourses and representations of mothering ultimately functioned to justify the exploitation of both enslaved and slaveholding women within the system of slavery. Above all, this project identifies mothering as a practical and ideological vehicle through which antebellum Southerners strived to preserve the white supremacist, patriarchal structure of the slaveholding household.
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