Can I read Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Early American Studies) on EtoBox?

Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Early American Studies) by Sasha Turner is a history book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Early American Studies) about?

Winner of the 2018 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves' reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women's labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves' interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted their owners' medicine and benevolence. Turner contends that the social bonds and cultural practices created around reproductive health care and childbirth challenged the economic purposes slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children. Through powerful stories that place the reader on the ground in plantation-era Jamaica, Contested Bodies reveals enslaved women's contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children, which put them at odds not only with the

Who reads Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Early American Studies)?

Author

Sasha Turner

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

Published

2017

Language

EN

ISBN

9780812249187

Category

history

Subjects

History, Sociology, Social Science

Rating

4.9 / 5 (26 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14