Research

Birthing A Nation: Enslaved Women and Midwifery in Early America, 1750-1820

Birthing A Nation explores the lives and work of enslaved midwives in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina during the eras of the American Revolution and Early Republic. It argues that by helping to birth free and enslaved children, enslaved midwives supported both southern families, namely African American families, and the growth of the United States in significant and paradoxical ways. Enslaved women navigated the physical, social, and commercial landscape of the revolutionary era to learn and practice midwifery, creating spaces to advocate for families and for themselves within a system of racial slavery. They accessed transatlantic networks of medical knowledge and goods, traversed the plantation landscape to aid families and communities through birth and death, and even earned compensation for this work that provided a small amount of financial agency.

Through that work, however, enslaved midwives inadvertently supported the birth and growth of the United States and the expansion of the slave system. Coupled with colonial-era laws that defined enslavement through the status of the mother and the increased growth of the enslaved population through childbirth, enslaved women and the children they bore formed the core of the plantation system. Throughout the eighteenth century, those engaged in the business of slavery scrutinized and commodified enslaved women’s bodies and developed and adapted capitalistic technologies to maximize profits from both crops and human capital. Further, the American Revolution catalyzed a reliance on the domestic reproduction of slave labor and increased the political significance of enslaved midwives’ actions through decisions like the non-importation resolutions and the Three-Fifths Compromise of the Constitution. Politicians, enslavers, and capitalists leveraged enslaved midwives and the children they helped to birth as political and financial capital in the new nation. As the United States expanded westward and closed the transatlantic slave trade, the institution of slavery expanded into new territories, solidifying a market for both cotton and domestic reproductive slavery. Those engaged in the business of slavery transformed enslaved midwives into essential resources that could help ensure successful plantations, healthy human capital, and buttress the American political economy.

Publications

“Building a Relational Database to Explore Enslaved Midwives’ Work in Early America,” in American Revolutions in the Digital Age, eds. Mark Boonshoft, Nora Slonimsky, and Ben Wright. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2024. 

“The Labors of Enslaved Midwives in Revolutionary Virginia,” in Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World, edited by Barbara Oberg. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019.

George Washington’s Midwives: The Economics of Childbirth under Slavery,” in Lapham’s Quarterly, June 19, 2019.

“Digital Storytelling: Presenting History in New Ways,” Blog post with Andrew Salamone, National Trust for Historic Preservation Forum Blog, November 1, 2017.

I am currently working on a book manuscript for this project, a database and corresponding website, and several journal articles and essays for edited collections.