Belly women

In his History of Jamaica, which was published in 1774, the planter and leading contemporary commentator on Jamaican affairs, Edward Long, attributed the high slave infant mortality rate amongst others to the ‘unskilfulness or absurd management of the negroe midwives’ and put forward some basic measures to enhance the survival rate of newborn slaves, such as a reduction in the workload of pregnant slave women. ¹ It was not until the late 1780s, however, that defenders of slavery seriously began to examine childbirth practices on the estates and proposed methods to improve them. This change was largely triggered by abolitionist pressure. In 1784, James Ramsay, an Anglican missionary who had lived and worked in St. Kitts for 19 years, published his Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves, which played a crucial role in arousing public concern about the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade. A former surgeon in the Royal Navy, Ramsay devoted considerable attention to the treatment of pregnant slave women. His account of slave women working until the last stages of their pregnancy, giving birth in ‘dark, damp, smoky’ huts and returning to work three weeks after the delivery, was strongly attacked by pro-slavery writers. ² The absentee Nevis planter and proslavery campaigner James Tobin, for instance, wrote in his Cursory Remarks upon the Rev Mr. Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (1785), that slave women were exempted from hard labour during the last months of their pregnancy, had access to a well-equipped lying-in room, were given baby clothes and a nurse to take care of them while lying-in, and generally did not return to work until four months after the delivery. ³ Similar rose-coloured accounts of slave women’s childbearing experiences were provided throughout the period 1780–1834 and served mainly to counteract the abolitionist accusation that planters and their white employees failed to elevate slave women and thus lacked sensibility; that is, they failed to display the moral qualities of compassion, self-control, sympathy, and benevolence which were used in metropolitan society as markers of a civilized nature. ⁴ The abolitionist emphasis on slave women as mothers is not surprising, considering that metropolitan society at the time increasingly defined women as natural maternal beings and also 12came to see childhood as a stage in life in its own right. ⁵ Apart from Ramsay, however, few antislavery writers addressed slave women’s childbearing practices. ⁶ They concentrated more on slave women’s nursing practices, as these enabled them better to demonstrate that slavery did not recognize the most important role that nature had bestowed on women and which was essential for the moral development of any society.