The Importance of Gender, Race and Reproduction in Laboring Women by Jennifer Morgan

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Recommended: Gender differences in slavery

In Laboring Women by Jennifer Morgan, the author talks about the transformations African Women suffer as they become slaves in America. The author explains how their race, gender and even their reproduction of African women became very important in the sex/gender system. She explains the differences of European, African and Creole and how their role was fit and fix in the sex/gender system in regards of production, body and kinship. Morgan explains the correlation of race and reproduction as well as how this affected the Atlantic World. She also explains the differences between whites and blacks and how they experience reproduction differently. Morgan also elaborates on how sex is a sexual disclosure. This gave us the conclusion on how the ideologies of race and reproduction are central to the organization of slavery. The center of discussion and analysis about the sex/gender system focus on the differences between African, European and Creole Women. The sex/gender system describe by Morgan focus on their production, body and kinship. European women are seen as domestic, African women’s work overlaps between agricultural and pastoral. They’ll work in the field non-stop, even after giving birth. African women hold knowledge about the pastoral and agricultural work “in the planting and cultivation of fields the daily task of a good Negro Woman” (145). While Creole women were subordinated, with the job of produce and reproduce. When it came to body, European women’s bodies were seeing as fragile. After birth the rest for a while before they could stand back again or return to their activities “European observers believed the post-delivery period of abstinence lasted three months, and others commented up two- to three year period o... ... middle of paper ... ...of the flatness of their noses…” (35) The descriptions on how Europeans physical appearance as difference in a exaggerate way from Africans play an important role in constructing race. Morgan gave us in Laboring Women many pictures that were display during the 18th hundreds, in there we can take a note how race was portray to the public. In conclusion, we can see how all this factors during the 18th century were important for the lives of women. The importance of race, gender and reproduction made this century what we know today. Discrimination against a different race, separation of gender, and the myths about reproduction because of race were all part of what African women and Creole women had to suffer and deal with. This assumptions in where ones race determine their reproduction and productivity maker slaves and gave profit and enrichment to the land owners.

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