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‘Lives of living death’: The reproductive lives of slave women in the cane world of Louisiana

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 06:32 authored by Richard Follett
This paper examines the seasonality of childbirth among slave women and addresses the relationship between seasonal workloads, nutrition, and pregnancy on large sugar plantations in nineteenth-century Louisiana. Unlike the rest of the American South, where the slave population grew, bondspeople in southern Louisiana experienced natural population decrease. This derived in part from imbalanced sex ratios, but as this article shows, conceptions peaked during the annual harvest season but fell away at other times due to nutritional stress, overwork, heat, and exhaustion. By combining plantation sources with contemporary scholarship on reproductive physiology, the article places Louisiana's reproductive history in contest and establishes the limits sugar production imposed on the slave women's capacity for childbirth.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

Slavery and Abolition

ISSN

0144-039X

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Issue

2

Volume

26

Page range

289-304

Pages

16.0

Department affiliated with

  • American Studies Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2012-02-06

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