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assignment 4

A woman who embodies traits that are caring, giving, strength, kindness and love could be considered to have the qualities a mother figure should have. Motherhood is expressing these characteristics towards a woman’s child. In the readings by Angela Davis and Silvia Federici, the joy that is supposed to accompany the motherhood status is practically obsolete. There are no sweet stories of mothers and their children in either piece; the roles women had to endure during those times were that of fear and pain. Given that the African women entrapped in slavery were seen only as laborers, the acts of mothering children was subsequently taken away, and the label of “breeder” was pasted unto them (Davis, 11). This also made it easier for the slave owners to yank young children away from their mothers and sell them as slaves as well. In this respect the women were somewhat overvalued than their male counterparts, because they could do work in the fields and bear children which could be sold off and therefore increase profits of the slave owners. They were able to disassociate the beauty of motherhood from female African slaves and turn them into breeding appliances. Similarly in the Federici reading, women were degraded and their rights were controlled by the European government. Expecting mothers were no longer able to rejoice in childbirth surrounded by the other women in their community and midwives were scrutinized by male doctors, who eventually stole their roles in the delivery room. The government put precedence to the unborn child over that of the women requiring midwives and doctors to save the child and not the mother in life or death situations. Women were victimized and punished under false allegations of infanticide or even reproducing without the government’s consent. The European government wanted full control over the population during the era of accumulation and just as the slave owners did in Davis’s reading, were able to turn women into baby making machine (Federici 102,103).