Birthing Abolition: Enslaved Women, Reproduction, and the Gradual End of Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

FAIN: FEL-273005-21

Cassia Roth
University of Georgia (Athens, GA 30602-0001)

Research and writing leading to a book on enslaved women, reproduction, and abolition in Brazil, 1820s-1888.

This project argues that enslaved women's reproductive agency shaped the legal parameters of abolition in nineteenth-century Brazil. It traces how enslaved women's reproduction, and elite efforts to control it, in the early century allowed for later legislation based on captive women's reproductive bodies. In particular the threat of reproductive resistance, or abortion and infanticide as purposeful attacks on the institution of slavery, loomed large in the imagination of both pro- and anti-slavery political elites. The project contends that negative biological growth in conjunction with enslaved women's actions created the space for abolitionists to implement the legal framework that ended slavery.

Associated Products

Rio de Janeiro Wet Nurses Dataset: Enslaved and Free Women in Rio de Janeiro, 1850 (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Rio de Janeiro Wet Nurses Dataset: Enslaved and Free Women in Rio de Janeiro, 1850
Author: Cassia Roth
Abstract: The “Rio de Janeiro Wet-Nursing Dataset” (RJWND) comprises all advertisements for wet nurses for the year of 1850 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, extracted from the city’s main commercial newspaper, Jornal do Commercio. “Mercenary” wet nursing, what contemporaries called the practice of paying other women to breastfeed their children, was a thriving market throughout the nineteenth century. Most wet nurses were enslaved women, with freed women of color and white immigrant women also working in the trade. More rarely, white Brazilian women whose newborns had died advertised their milk. We can draw several conclusions from this data. Most importantly, RJWND demonstrates the ubiquity of wet nursing in urban Brazil. Women from all races, classes, and legal statuses participated in this activity, whether as elite mothers not breastfeeding their own children, or as free, freed, freed African, and enslaved women breastfeeding other women’s children. It also sheds light on how enslavers valued wet nurses both for their reproductive labors (wet nursing) and their productive outputs (cleaning, cooking).
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://jsdp.enslaved.org
Primary URL Description: The Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation (ISSN 2691-297X) is a digital academic journal that publishes datasets and accompanying data articles about the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation builds from and expands upon the pioneering digital scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade. As such, the journal elevates curated data to a first-class publication status, providing scholarly review, recognition, and credit to those who undertake the intellectual work involved in generating, cleaning, contextualizing, and describing digital records relating to bondage and freedom in Africa and the diaspora.
Access Model: Open access

'Maria Simoa, Who Birthed Twenty-Four Children': Slavery, Motherhood, and Freedom on the Benedictine Estates (Article)
Title: 'Maria Simoa, Who Birthed Twenty-Four Children': Slavery, Motherhood, and Freedom on the Benedictine Estates
Author: Cassia Roth
Author: Robson Costa
Abstract: This article explores gradual manumission policies on the Order of Saint Benedict’s slave- holdings in the Northeastern province of Pernambuco, Brazil, between 1866 and 1871. Relying on private religious records from the Monastery of Saint Benedict of Olinda (in Pernambuco) and parliamentary debates, we contend that the Benedictine order was the first corporate enslaver to implement institu- tionalized strategies of gradual manumission in Brazil. To do so, they relied both on enslaved women’s reproductive capabilities and on their adherence to church-sanctioned gender roles. We further argue that the order’s decisions and actions were ahead of national developments in several important ways, and that, to some degree, these projects were a test case for future national abolitionist policies. Although the congregation did not involve itself in political debates, its actions created a working exam- ple of gradual abolition based on enslaved women’s bodies that abolitionists used to make their case nationally.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://read.dukeupress.edu/hahr
Primary URL Description: Published in cooperation with the Conference on Latin American History of the American Historical Association. Hispanic American Historical Review pioneered the study of Latin American history and culture in the United States and remains the most widely respected journal in the field. HAHR's comprehensive book review section provides commentary, ranging from brief notices to review essays, on every facet of scholarship on Latin American history and culture.
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Hispanic American Historical Review
Publisher: Duke University Press

Gênero, raça e reprodução no Brasil (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Gênero, raça e reprodução no Brasil
Abstract: Talk given at the Instituto Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, PE, Brazil.
Author: Cassia Roth
Date: 04/26/2022
Location: Instituto Federal de Pernambuco

Conversas contemporâneas: A vida reprodutiva das mulheres no Brasil (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Conversas contemporâneas: A vida reprodutiva das mulheres no Brasil
Abstract: Talk given in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Author: Cassia Roth
Date: 04/25/2022
Location: Fundação Oswaldo Cruz
Primary URL: https://youtu.be/QNxudp589sA

Embodied Alienation: Enslaved Wet-Nursing in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Embodied Alienation: Enslaved Wet-Nursing in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Author: Cassia Roth
Abstract: Virtual Talk
Date: 02/10/2022
Conference Name: Consortium for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, Obstetrics Working Group

What is Reproductive Justice? (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: What is Reproductive Justice?
Author: Cassia Roth
Abstract: Guest lecture, University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Gender Studies, Introduction to Gender Studies. January 24.
Year: 2022
Audience: Undergraduate

Roundtable: Women, Family, and Reproduction (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Roundtable: Women, Family, and Reproduction
Author: Cassia Roth
Abstract: Participation in Roundtable: Women, Family, and Reproduction. Southern Historical Association (SHA), virtual conference.
Date: 11/4/2022
Conference Name: Southern Historical Association

Reproduction, Motherhood, and Black Women's Resistance in the Sugar Mills of Pernambuco, Brazil, 1790-1871 (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Reproduction, Motherhood, and Black Women's Resistance in the Sugar Mills of Pernambuco, Brazil, 1790-1871
Author: Cassia Roth
Author: Robson Costa
Abstract: Conference at the University of the Açores
Date: 06/29/2022
Conference Name: Lusophone Studies Association

Mothers of Slavery: Reproduction, Motherhood, and Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Pernambuco, Brazil (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Mothers of Slavery: Reproduction, Motherhood, and Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Pernambuco, Brazil
Author: Cassia Roth
Author: Robson Costa
Abstract: Iberian Conference on African Studies, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal.
Date: 07/07/2022
Conference Name: Iberian Conference on African Studies

Roundtable: Interventions in the Lives of Mothers – Capturing the History of Reproduction (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Roundtable: Interventions in the Lives of Mothers – Capturing the History of Reproduction
Author: Cassia Roth
Abstract: Participation in virtual roundtable
Date: 02/25/2022
Conference Name: American Historical Association

Silences and the Corporeal: Reading the Enslaved Body in (Historical) Pain (Book Section)
Title: Silences and the Corporeal: Reading the Enslaved Body in (Historical) Pain
Author: Cassia Roth
Editor: Jerome Branche
Abstract: Cassia Roth’s Chapter 8, “Silences and the Corporeal: The Enslaved Body in (Historical) Pain,” trains a critical lens on the clinical reports that document medical (gynecological, obstetric) practice in the eighteen hundreds in order to highlight the differential treatment received by Afro-Brazilian women in childbirth, vis-à-vis their Eurodescendant counterparts, and the effect of this treatment on the former. To the extent that physicians disregard the personhood of the enslaved women entrusted to their care, Roth argues, or seem impervious to their pain in their clinical practice, they formalize and authorize the notion of their subhumanity. Roth therefore exhorts fellow researchers today to read between the lines of these medical reports and to practice a “corporeal reading” that might appropriately acknowledge the visceral and imaginary impact of the medi- cal archive and thereby accord these subjects the racial justice historically denied them. Her intervention is a most timely one, given the once-in-a-century pandemic that descended upon us in 2020 and the much commented upon COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among African Americans, given the increasing awareness of past crimes perpetrated against Black bodies in the name of medical science.
Year: 2022
Access Model: Subscription
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Book Title: Trajectories of Empire: Transhispanic Reflections on the African Diaspora, pp. 191-211.
ISBN: 9780826504593

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