Date of Award

8-16-2024

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

History

First Advisor

Nicole Maskiell

Abstract

Enslavement in the American South persisted as a form of subjugation that endured into the nineteenth century. The origins of slavery stemmed from enslavers’ aspirations for dominance. This compelled displacement involved the removal of Africans from their native lands and their subsequent transport as chattels to America. Slavery gave rise to paternalism, an attempt to justify exploitation to resolve the fundamental contradiction inherent in slavery. Paternalism gave rise to the false idea of ultimate submission, which historians have agreed that most enslavers never attained because of slave resistance. However, the study of slave resistance had been primarily focused on enslaved men before the twenty-first century, when historians began to use the experiences of enslaved women to contribute to a gender binary in understanding slave resistance. To explore the topic of resistance in enslaved women, this paper focuses on infanticide, abortion, and the use of contraceptives as reproductive choices used by enslaved women as resistance in the American South. This paper extrapolates the experiences of enslaved women on some antebellum plantations in South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee using plantation journals, medical journals, and the 1930s Works Progress Administration formerly enslaved narratives. This expands our understanding of slave resistance, the experiences of enslaved black women in the antebellum South, and their agency to control reproduction during slavery.

Rights

© 2024, Adedoyin Adekunle

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