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Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. By Jennifer L. Morgan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Pp. xi, 279. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $55.00 cloth; $19.95 paper.
Despite the plethora of recent works on the presence of Africans in the Americas sparked by the surge of interest in the Atlantic World, there remains a lacuna in discussions of women within that context. Morgan seeks to fill this gap in her recent monograph on women and slavery in early colonial Barbados and the Carolinas. To do this, Morgan focuses on African slave women's dual roles in production and reproduction in the racially polarized worlds of the British colonial project. The work presents these roles not as an interesting sidebar in the history of slavery in the Americas, but instead argues that understanding the contradictions inherent in assumptions about slave women's reproductive capacities should be seen as a "foundational methodology" through which to examine the early American past. Although Morgan may be overstating her case here, the book...