About the Author and Further Readings

MEET THE AUTHOR

Emily West is a professor of History at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. She is the author of Enslaved Women in America: From Colonial Times to Emancipation as well as numerous articles and essays about enslaved women in the United States South. Her research focuses on enslaved women, the relationships between enslaved spouses, family life under enslavement, affective ties between enslaved people and free people of color, and enslaved wetnurses.

Assisted by Sian David. Sian David studied as an undergraduate student in the Department of History at the University of Reading. Her work on this project was supported by the University’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (UROP).

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EDITORIAL CONTRIBUTORS

Tim Lockley, University of Warwick
Ashley Hollinshead, Monticello Historic Site
Catherine Stiers, Special Collections at the College of Charleston

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SELECT FURTHER READINGS

Section 1: Introduction

Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, 2004).

Brian Connolly and Marisa Fuentes, "Introduction: From Archives of Slavery to Liberated Futures," History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History 6, 2 (2016), 105-116.

Jim Downs, "When the Present is Past: Writing the History of Sexuality and Slavery," in Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris, Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas (Athens, GA, 2018), 189-204.

Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (Philadelphia, 2016).

Marisa J. Fuentes, "Power and Historical Figuring: Rachel Pringle Polgreen’s troubled Archive," in Jennifer Brier, Jim Downs and Jennifer Morgan (eds.), Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America (Urbana, 2016), 143-168.

Saidya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (New York, 1997).

Saidiya V. Hartman, "Venus in Two Acts," Small Axe 12, 2 (2008), 1-14.

Darlene Clark Hine, "Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance," Signs 14 (1989), 912-920.

Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2004).

Section 2: Enslaved Women's Work

Josephine Beokku-Betts, "We Got our Way of Cooking Things: Women, Food, and Preservation of Cultural Identity among the Gullah," Gender and Society 9, 5 (Oct. 1995), 535-56.

Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and the Making of South Carolina: An Introductory Essay (Columbia: South Carolina Department of Archives and History, 1995).

William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Larry E. Hudson Jr., ed., Working Toward Freedom: Slave Society and Domestic Economy in the American South (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1994).

Larry E. Hudson Jr., To Have and To Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997).

Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1985).

Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

Emily West and R. J. Knight, "'Mothers’ Milk': Slavery, Wet-Nursing, and Black and White Women in the Antebellum South," Journal of Southern History, 83, 1 (2017), 37-68.

Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Antebellum South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987).

Betty Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995).

Section 3: Enslaved Women, their Families and Communities

Daina Ramey Berry, Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

Wilma Dunaway, The African American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2017).

Andrea Livesey, "Conceived in Violence: Enslaved Mothers and Children Born of Rape in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana," Slavery and Abolition 38, 2 (June 2017), 373-391.

Damian Alan Pargas, The Quarters and the Fields: Slave Families in the Non-Cotton South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010).

Tyler D. Parry, "Married in Slavery Time: Jumping the Broom in Atlantic Perspective," Journal of Southern History 81,2 (May 2015), 273-312.

Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004).

Emily West, "Reflections on the History and Historians of the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves: Enslaved Women and Intimate Partner Violence," American Nineteenth Century History, 19, 1 (2018), 1-21.

Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Antebellum South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987).

Section 4: Enslaved Women and Slaveholders

Edward E. Baptist, "'Cuffy,' 'Fancy Maids' and 'One-Eyed Men': Rape, Commodification and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States," American Historical Review 106, 5 (2001), 1619-1650.

Carol Bleser, Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Catherine Clinton, ed., Fanny Kemble’s Journals (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2000).

Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon, 1982).

Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017).

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Stephanie Jones-Rogers, They Were her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, 2019).

Wilma King, "'Prematurely Knowing of Evil Things': The Sexual Abuse of African American Girls and Young Women in Slavery and Freedom," Journal of African American History 99, 3 (Summer 2014), pp.173-196.

John Hammond Moore, ed., A Plantation Mistress on the Eve of the Civil War: The Diary of Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard, 1860-1861 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996).

Deidre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017).

Gregory D. Smithers, Slave Breeding: Sex, Violence and Memory in African American History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012).

Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

Marli F. Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina 1830-1880 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998).

Section 5: Resisting Enslavement

Jenifer L. Barclay, "Bad Breeders and Monstrosities: Racializing Childlessness and Congenital Disabilities in Slavery and Freedom," Slavery and Abolition 28, 2 (June 2017), 287-302.

R. A. and A. H. Bauer, "Day to Day Resistance to Slavery," Journal of Negro History, 27 (1942), 388-418.

John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Loren, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Mary E. Frederickson and Delores M. Walter, eds., Gendered Resistance: Women, Slavery and the Legacy of Margaret Garner (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

Timothy Lockley, ed., Maroon Communities in South Carolina: A Documentary Record (Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 2009).

Amani T. Marshall, "'They are supposed to be lurking about the City’: Enslaved women Runaways in Antebellum Charleston," South Carolina Historical Magazine 115, 3 (July 2014), 188-212.

Liese Perrin, "Resisting Reproduction: Reconsidering Contraception in the Old South," Journal of American Studies 35, 2 (2001), 255-274.

Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (New Haven, 2006).

Emily West, "Dolly, Lavinia, Maria, and Susan: Enslaved Women in Antebellum South Carolina," in M. J. Spruill, V. W. Littlefield, and J. M. Johnson, eds., South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume 1 (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 127-142.

Betty Wood, "Some Aspects of Female Resistance to Chattel Slavery in Low County Georgia, 1763-1815," The Historical Journal 30 (1987), 603-622.

Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974, 1996).

Section 6: Enslaved Women's Cultural Lives

Josephine Beoku-Betts, "'She Make Funny Flat Cake She Call Saraka': Gullah Women and Food Practices Under Slavery Quarters," in Working Toward Freedom: Slave Society and Domestic Economy in the American South, ed. Larry E. Hudson (New York: University of Rochester Press, 1994), 211-231.

John W. Blassingame, "Status and Social Structure in the Slave Community: Evidence from New Sources," in Perspectives and Irony in American Slavery ed. Harry P. Owens and Carl Degler (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1976), 137-151.

Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

Margaret Washington Creel, "A Peculiar People": Slave Religion and Community Culture Among the Gullahs (New York and London: New York University Press, 1988).

Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

Charles W. Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984).

Charles W. Joyner, Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

Whittington B. Johnson, "Free African-American Women in Savannah, 1800-1860: Affluence and Autonomy Amid Adversity," The Georgia Historical Quarterly 76, 2 (Summer 1992), 260-283.

The Penn Center, St Helena Island, South Carolina: http://www.penncenter.com/.

William S. Pollitzer, The Gullah People and their African Heritage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005).

Shane White and Graham White, "Slave Clothing and African-American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Past and Present 148 (1995), 149-186.

Shane White and Graham White, "Slave Hair and African American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Journal of Southern History 61, 1 (1995), 45-76.

Section 7: Women in the Urban Lowcountry

Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry, eds., Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2014).

Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, eds., No Chariot Let Down: Charleston’s Free People of Color on the Eve of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

Cynthia Kennedy, Braided Relations, Entwined Lives: The Women of Charleston’s Urban Slave Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

Wilma King, The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women in the Slave Era (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2006).

Larry Koger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860 (London: Mcfarland, 1985).

Tim Lockley, Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in Lowcountry Georgia, 750-1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001).

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, "The Bettingall-Tunno Family and the Free Black Women of Antebellum Charleston," in Marjorie Spruill, Valinda Littlefield and Joan Marie Johnson, eds., South Carolina Women: Their Life and Times Vol. 1 (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 143-167.

Section 8: Enslaved Women in the Civil War

Ira Berlin, ed., Remembering Slavery: African Americans talk about their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation (New York: The New Press, 1999).

Frances Butler Leigh, Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation Since the War (London: Richard Bentley, 1883).

Antje Dallmann, "'Lots of doctoring, with great success': Healthcare within the Port Royal Experiment and the Work of Laura M. Towne," European Journal of American Studies 10, 1 (2015) https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.10668.

Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Tera W. Hunter, To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1997).

Susan Eva O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1976).

Leslie Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

Leslie Schwalm, "US Slavery, Civil War, and the Emancipation of Enslaved Mothers," Slavery and Abolition 38, 2 (June 2017), 392-407.

Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp: An African American Woman’s Civil War Memoir (originally published in 1902, Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2006).

Marli F. Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina 1830-1880 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998).

Collections Featured from Lowcountry Digital Library

Avery Research Center Sweetgrass Basket Collection

Charleston Slave Passes

Civil War and Reconstruction Era Stereoscope Photographs of the Port Royal Region

College of Charleston Pamphlet Collection

College of Charleston Scrapbooks and Photo Albums

College of Charleston Stereoscope Views

Heyward and Ferguson family papers, 1806-1923

Illustrated Newspaper Clippings, 1840-1917

Phosphate, Farms, and Family – The Donner Collection

Rice Harvest at Mulberry Plantation (Berkeley County, SC)