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Shaikhah Alhomaizi – Assignement 4

In this response I am focusing on the concept of “motherhood”, and how it’s been covered in different readings. Throughout the readings, we read about how women were oppressed and given very little opportunities. In particular, we read about how mothers had severe expectations placed on them, such as obeying their husbands and taking care of their children. However, in this passage, Davis discusses how this ideal of motherhood doesn’t fully apply to female black slaves. “The slave system defined Black people as chattel. Since women, no less than men, were viewed as profitable labor-units, they might as well have been genderless as far as the slaveholders were concerned. In the words of one scholar, “the slave woman was first a full-time worker for her owner, and only incidentally a wife, mother and homemaker.”10 Judged by the evolving nineteenth century ideology of femininity, which emphasized women’s roles as nurturing mothers and gentle companions and housekeepers for their husbands, Black women were practically anomalies.” (Davis, 9) Like Davis, Morgan talked about the different standards that applied to black mothers. “Like his predecessors, Ligon offered further proof of Africans’ capacity for physical labor-their aptitude for slavery-through ease of childbearing. “In a fortnight [after giving birth] this woman is at worke with her Pickaninny at her back, as merry a soule as any is there.” 104 In the Americas, African women’s purportedly pain-free childbearing thus continued to be central… “when slave mothers go to work, they tie the young children onto their backs. While they work they frequently give their children the breasts, across the armpits, and let them suckle.” In less outlandish terms then, Spoeri worked to reconcile the tension between mothering and hard labor.” (Morgan, 48-49) In this passage, Morgan discusses how travelers reconciled the contradiction between the hard labor that would be expected of black female slaves and the usual expectations of motherhood at that time. At that time, (white) women were expected to be nurturing, gentle and to not work.

Davis and Morgan both discuss the concept of motherhood and how it is applied differently to white and black mothers. In my opinion, these standards are applied to maintain white male supremacy. When it comes to white women, these men want women to be obedient and gentle, and not work (not have economic power). As for black women, these man want them to preform hard labor. Therefore, the expectation or stereotype placed on women is that they can handle both hard labor and child rearing.