![]() ![]() But the makers found what it was used for and they changed the way of making turpentine. "In them days the turpentine was strong and ten or twelve drops would miscarry you. They ‘unfixed’ themselves by taking calomel and turpentine: WPA respondent Lu Lee spoke of how enslaved women tried to induce abortions to end unwanted pregnancies. Many slaveholders therefore forbade women from possessing cotton roots and when they discovered enslaved women chewing or storing cotton roots, women paid for their resistance with violent beatings.īeyond cotton root, women possessed knowledge of other tinctures as abortifacients. Once free to discuss these secretive forms of women’s resistance, formerly enslaved people across the South and South West discussed the commonness of deliberate abortions among the enslaved population. On cotton plantations throughout the South, including Sea Island cotton plantations in the Lowcountry, women chewed cotton roots to prevent pregnancy or end a pregnancy already in progress. Women’s actions also provided empowerment and control over their bodies. Their gender-specific knowledge and cultural practices resisted dominant cultural norms. Medicinal herbs were also used by the slave community to regulate menstrual cycles and assist in births. Women also used their knowledge of plants and medicine-knowledge passed down generationally-as a means of preventing pregnancy and attempting to induce abortions. The cause of these infants’ death though-purposeful infanticide, accidental smothering, or another undiagnosed health problem-is impossible to know.īotanical sketch of cotton plant, from Charles D’Orbigny’s Dictionnaire Universel d’Histoire Naturelle, 1849, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Occasionally, too, slaveholders accused enslaved mothers of being careless and accidentally smothering infants, resulting in death. The most famous example of infanticide was the case Margaret Garner, who took the life of her own daughter when caught trying to flee bondage with her children. O verall, however, historical evidence suggests infanticide was a very rare action taken by mothers, in part because enslavers might have mistaken infanticide for other forms of infant death, and also because women who took their own children’s lives would have faced severe punishment, even death, for committing these acts. ![]() They simply saw no future worth enduring. Infanticide speaks to slavery’s horrific violence, pain and trauma and while some historians have perceived the practice as a form of resistance that operated ‘within’ the system rather than by leaving it, along with suicide, infanticide conveys that some enslaved people tragically saw death as the only escape from bondage. Wood engraving depicting Margaret Garner, an enslaved African American woman who murdered her children to avoid their re-enslavement, Thomas Noble, 1867, courtesy of the Library of Congress.Īt the most extreme end of the spectrum of enslaved women’s day-to-day resistance lay infanticide-taking the life of one’s own children rather than raise them enslaved. Continuities and Changes in Women’s Lives: From Enslavement to Emancipation.Enslaved Women in Charleston and Savannah.Exploitation through Reproductive Labor. ![]() ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |