This essay discusses sexual and reproductive violence, as well as lynching.
"I took my hoe and knocked him plum down," Aunt Martha said to Mabel Farrior and Lois Lynn sometime in 1936 or 1937. They were a pair of preservationists from the Federal Writers Project (FWP) interviewing Aunt Martha as part of a public records initiative to memorialize the firsthand accounts of the last living emancipated people. Believing herself to be about 100 years old then, Aunt Martha recounted her experience of being held hostage on an Alabama plantation "long before the War between the States."
Aunt Martha remembered when an overseer said something to her "he had no bizness say"—presumably something so sexually violent that she felt compelled to strike him despite great risk to herself. After she "knocked him plum down," she ran but was soon apprehended by her enslaver "Marster Lucas," who, of course, beat her. He only stopped after Aunt Martha repeated whatever vile words the overseer had said to her. According to Aunt Martha, "Marster Lucas . . . wouldn' let nobody run over his niggers." For only his dominion was sanctioned in the bounds of his forced labor camp.
Aunt Martha is part of a long legacy of formerly enslaved Black women who protected their reproductive autonomy despite living under immensely degrading conditions. With Partus sequitur ventrem—a 17th-century legal innovation—determined that children inherited the status of their mothers. Enslavers (a.k.a. hostage-takers), physicians, and politicians used this legal advantage and aligned their white supremacist aims to control and surveil Black enslaved peoples' bodies thoroughly. The enslaved womb was a precious resource that could create and nourish endless capital while powering a paternalistic medical industry that was newly emerging in the antebellum South. The white supremacist triangulation between the plantation economy, the state, and the healthcare industry was tied to enslaved Black women's profitability in bearing children.
Black women were distinctly aware of their location in the plantation economy. And with this awareness, they often deployed surreptitious methods to affirm their reproductive autonomy and resist the dominance of their enslavers and the doctors who stood to profit through the harm infected on Black women's bodies. This reproductive resistance would become the basis of a particular political identity that regarded reproductive autonomy as an interconnected matter of justice, social belonging, and communal health. We now understand this brilliant intersectional analysis as Reproductive Justice, which Reproductive Justice Collective SisterSong defines "as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities."
The enslaved womb was a precious resource that could create and nourish endless capital while powering a paternalistic medical industry that was newly emerging in the antebellum South.
Enslaved women's stories live in a niche portion of scholarship that explores and contextualizes the public memories of formerly enslaved Black people. For enslaved women, their relationship to reproduction was clandestine and cooperative; it lived in well-practiced whispers and slight glances, a highly precise language only they could master.
Though these women were delicate in their reproductive habits, they left clues that Black feminist scholars can deftly piece together. Deborah Gray White stands tall as a pioneer in this regard. In her groundbreaking Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, she successfully enters the "private world" of enslaved women. White innovates the methodological processes scholars use to recruit data to construct congruent stories from incomplete, invisibilized, or filtered sources. In celebrating White, Darlene Clark Hine, a gifted codebreaker herself, illustrates how White combines the storytelling traditions of Indigenous and Black communities with mainstream academic practices to showcase "new methodological approaches, [that use] tantalizing language and metaphors [to] capture some of the myriad complexities" of enslaved women's lives.
These lived realities were communalized. White demonstrated how "female cooperation in the realm of medical care helped foster bonding that led to collaboration in the area of resistance." Her work unveiled the clandestine ways Black women retained control of their reproductive and maternal capacities, despite enslavers' dominion.
Enslaved women were so committed to each other that hostage-takers were unable to determine the frequency of abortions that occurred on the plantation. This revolutionary detail would prove that Black women navigated the institution of enslavement with full awareness of their wombs as a conduit for white profitability and relied upon kinship and community to self-determine the degree of their participation.
In "Resisting Reproduction: Reconsidering Slave Contraception in the Old South," Liese M. Perrin presented enslaved women's use of contraceptives as "a form of strike," thus building on and gendering W.E.B. du Bois' earlier analysis of the Civil War as a Black self-determined general strike against white organized capital. Alys Eve Weinbaum further analyzes the reproductive labor power enslaved women yielded through a novel labor studies lens in "Gendering the General Strike: W.E.B. Du Boise's Black Reconstruction and Black Feminism's 'Propaganda of History.'"
Enslaved women regularly used preventative measures to avoid or terminate pregnancy, and supplementary evidence suggests a high degree of frequency. Enslavers were so suspicious of widespread use that advice manuals warned of herbs that could induce miscarriages or prevent pregnancy. One Tennessee doctor diarized how enslavers were privy to the widespread use of herbs, with cotton root being the most notorious.
But the most reliable testimony comes from formerly enslaved people themselves.
Sometime between 1936 and 1938, Mr. Dave L. Byrd of Texas recounted how enslaved women "become wise to this here cotton root" and the use of it became so widespread he worried about the "depopulation" of Black people. Mr. Byrd said that, despite being heavily surveilled, enslaved women would "slip out at night," harvest cotton roots, and conceal them "under their quarters." Though this practice was outlawed in Texas, Mr. Byrd shared that illegalization "never done any good."
Mrs. Anna Lee of Texas also recalled how regularly cotton roots were used "to keep from giving birth to babies" and shared in Mr. Byrd's assessment of the ineffectiveness of the restrictive measures.
Though Mr. Dave Byrd and Mrs. Anna Lee shared these sentiments nearly 100 years ago, this assessment on the ineffectiveness of abortion bans echoed those shared by reproductive justice advocates today, who warn that prohibiting abortions does not prevent people from getting them; prohibition merely forces pregnant people to procure abortions under unsafe conditions.
In her narrative, Mrs. Lu Lee of Texas spoke of an enslaved girl forced to endure solitary confinement after giving birth to an overseer's child. The enslaver did not authorize such a "union" and therefore, the overseer Zeke Bosman, was "run off the place." In confinement, the young girl was denied visits from "her paw and maw," despite having recently given birth.
New mothers whose pregnancies the enslaver sanctioned were afforded 72 hours of rest. After giving birth, these new mothers "stayed in bed three days and got up on the fourth." If they'd had "a bad time" in childbirth, they were allowed an additional day. This torturous denial of family support and post-natal healing could be why some of the pregnant women who Mrs. Lee communed with "unfixed themselves by taking calomel and turpentine." According to Mrs. Lee, this preventative formula was so effective that manufacturers would change their chemical composition, rendering them futile as abortifacients. In Mrs. Lee's ancestral memory, "it ain't no good no more."
But when Mr. Dave Byrd, Mrs. Anna Lee, and Mrs. Lu Lee would disclose these reproductive acts of resistance as only witnesses, Mrs. Mary Gaffney not only professed to using herbs but delighted in doing so!
Born in Seville, Mississippi in 1846, she was forcefully relocated to Texas in 1860, thus making her 92 when she was interviewed in Madisonville, Texas on January 19, 1938. Her enslaver forced her to marry Mr. Paul Gaffney, a man she "just hated." In her dislike of him, she refused to have sex with him, prompting Mr. Gaffney to alert the enslaver to Mrs. Gaffney's resistance.
After receiving harsh corporal punishment, Mrs. Gaffney relented and "let the negro have his way." Aware that her enslaver was eagerly awaiting capital accumulation by way of her womb, she "cheated Maser," and "never did have any slaves to grow," much to her enslaver's bewilderment.
She admitted: "…I kept cotton roots and chewed them all the time but I was careful not to let Maser know or catch me, so I never did have any children while I was a slave." After emancipation, she would go on to have five children with Mr. Gaffney, a dynamic ripe for its own study.
While contraceptives and abortions were routine methods of reproductive resistance, so too was an outright refusal to sexually comply with enslavers and enslaved men alike. Aunt Martha "knocked him plum down," and Mrs. Gaffney refused until she couldn't.
In Alabama, Mrs. Charity Grigsby remembered an enslaved woman who had recently given birth. The nursing mother would not submit to the sexual desires of a brutal overseer named Sanders who "was de meanest one of dem all." Sanders threatened that if she didn't submit "dey was a black coffin over her haid." As he loaded his gun, she still refused. With "de gun barrel propped under his chin . . . and de other end settin' on de ground," the overseer accidentally shot himself to death instead of "dat sucklin' woman." Praise be.
In the 1850s, a teenage girl named Celia had already borne one child from her enslaver Robert Newsom, when he invaded her cabin and attempted to assault her as her children slept. Celia killed him, striking him twice with a large stick and rolling his dead body into the fireplace. The subsequent legal case was its own spectacle, and many scholars have studied Celia's case to remark upon the contradictions within antebellum legal paradigms. Still, Celia was found guilty and lynched by the state on December 21, 1855.
Black women navigated the institution of enslavement with full awareness of their wombs as a conduit for white profitability and relied upon kinship and community to self-determine the degree of their participation.
These stories—these experiences—were the foundation upon which Black women formed a political identity that regarded reproductive autonomy as an interwoven matter of justice, social belonging, and communal health. From emancipation onward, Black women would use a variety of methods to construct and secure dignified livelihoods for themselves and their loved ones. Some turned to the legal system. In "Prematurely Knowing of Evil Things: The Sexual Abuse of African American Girls and Young Women in Slavery and Freedom," Wilma King demonstrated how Black women provided harrowing testimony to the Freedmen's Bureau and other Reconstruction-era institutions in seeking justice for sexual assault. But as the legal system is a manifestation of anti-Black oppression, as Celia's story proves, other channels of advocacy and solidarity were required.
In "Work That Body: African American Women, Work and Leisure in Atlanta and the New South," Tera W. Hunter highlighted the astounding Atlanta women during Reconstruction. She wrote about the Black women who formed "secret societies" as solidaristic, mutual aid networks to confront and subvert white dominion while solidifying intracommunal kinship and trust. They would silently boycott employers who cheated them and pass along financial resources between peers. These cooperative networks were so effective at securing economic and social benefits for Black women and their families, some local politicians threatened to outlaw these secret societies altogether.
The examples of how formerly enslaved women and their daughters—and their daughters and then their daughters—would construct a vibrant and comprehensive political identity rooted in control of one's body, are endless.
Angela Davis did phenomenal work in tracking formerly enslaved women who would become instrumental campaigners in the struggles for women's suffrage, despite enduring racist hostilities from alleged allies. Scholarship on the Black women who would contribute exceptional feminist insights by way of their experiences within the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements is sprawling. Welfare advocates in the 1970s who connected themes of reproductive control to family planning and economic positionality are finally getting their due. Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Zora Neale Hurston are giants in Black women's literature and their brilliance arose from their laborious efforts to capture and retell imaginative versions based on enslaved women's lives.
Taken together, this political identity formation is the much-needed engine as we navigate fascist terrain. As the nation-state remains obsessed with Black wombs and the Black people they belong to, this little-known history of reproductive resistance during a time of great degradation finds unfortunate, but not insurmountable, contemporary relevance. All we have to do is listen and apply the lessons learned. Sometimes, all it takes is a hoe and the willingness to knock a man plum down.