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Antonella’s Assignment 04

Motherhood is known as the practice of being a mother and having a sense of maternal instinct towards your children. Both Angela Davis and Jennifer Morgan mentioned the concept of motherhood though in different explanation based on historical facts and their opinion.  Morgan starts off the discussion of motherhood by mentioning how the women were seen at first by many accounts written by various explores. The explorer, Richard Ligon, had first seen a black woman as an utmost stunning creature whose beauty and grace match that of Queen Anne. Later, more travelers and explorers had begun to write about how the black women was an object of desire. However black women were also viewed as unwomanly compared to white women and were marked by a reproductive value that was dependent on their sex and the concept of the black women’s lack of femininity. Ligon had changed his views of the black women seen them as monsters with breast the size of their torso appearing to look as if they had six legs. Through this concept, mothers were monstrous and were believed to have only had one child in their lifetime. According to The Travels of Sir John Mandevill, when women have children they may give them to what man they had conceived the child with. Painting the native women as a foul vision of a woman further dissociating the concept the Europeans have about motherhood. To add to the concept of being as a foul mother by The Europeans was that according to BattelJ, women were extremely fruitful with fertility. However, they were not interested in their children so they would be buried alive so that there was no child to care of. The image of Savagery had begun with cannibalism and ended with the mothers who had consented to the killing of the children they bore. (Morgan, 1997:13-30) Davis starts off the discussion of motherhood by mentioning that black women were seen no less than                black men, they were viewed as an equal profitable labor-units, to the point of being genderless in the eyes of the slaveholders. To quote one scholar, the slave woman was at first a full-time worker for her master and then a wife, mother and homemaker outside of their work from the needs of the master. However, the concept of Black men and women seen as genderless. Black women were practically an anomaly due to the developing nineteenth century philosophy of femininity which emphasized women’s roles as nurturing mothers and gentle companions and housekeepers for their husbands.as well as the fact that many Slave owners saw that slave women were not mothers at all but more of slave breeders. (Davis, 1981:9-11). The concept of motherhood for black women were not seen as mother until the publication of the anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Where the creation of the mammy stereotype had helped view black motherhood in a different light with the traits of having a superior Christian morality, an unfaltering maternal instincts, gentleness and fragility with the character of Eliza, who Davis sees as white motherhood personified in blackface. (1981:31).