

































The womb: a site of domination and resistance in the 
Pre-emancipation British Caribbean

Collin Xia 2T1
York University
Faculty of Graduate Studies, Department of Political Science 

Beginning in the 1780s, British Caribbean plantocra-
cies faced the looming threat of slave trade abolition 
which would end the flow of enslaved African labour 
to Caribbean plantation colonies. An enslaved woman’s 
function as the source of blackness and legal slave 
status made their wombs essential to a future without 
readily available slave imports. Narratives centring the 
intensifying colonial domination of enslaved women’s 
wombs highlight abolitionists and slave owners’ 
deployment of enslave women’s reproductive labour in 
slave-breeding programs to produce a self-sustaining 
source of labour. This narrative neglects the agency 
enslaved women exerted in exacting control over their 
sexuality, marriage status, pregnancies, childbirth 
experience, and child-rearing process that jeopardised 
the institution of slavery in “gynecological revolt.” 
This essay privileges the feminized, unarmed, sexual, 
bodily defiance of enslaved women within the greater, 
often masculinized Caribbean slavery scholarship to 
argue that the womb was a site of intensifying colonial 
domination in the Age of Abolition but more signifi-
cantly a site of women’s revolutionary struggle against 
slavery.

A B S T R A C T

B I O

Collin Xia is a graduate of the University of Toronto’s International Relations program 
and Master’s Student at York University’s Political Science Department. His research 
interests include Queer International Relations, Settler-Colonialism, and the Black 
Diaspora

© 2021 Collin Xia
Caribbean Studies Students’ Union, Canada - https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/cquilt/

                       This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 
                       To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Poems on the Abolition of 
the Slave Trade; written. 
Fine Art. Encyclopædia 

Britannica Image
Quest. Accessed Jul 22, 2021.

Keywords: British Caribbean, 
Jamaica, enslaved women, 
British slave abolition, 
biological reproduction, 
Atlantic slave trade, 
gynecological revolt, the womb 

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    Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery 
               (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 4.
     Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica 
               (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 10. 
     Morgan, Laboring Women, 1. 
     Turner, Contested Bodies, 18. 
     Morgan, Laboring Women, 11.
 

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Women’s bodies and labour have been at 
the heart of colonial monoculture export 
economies and the entire racial slavery 
system.  They were “important sites of 
political struggles over slavery, abolition, 
and colonial reform,” as their sexuality, 
reproductive labour, and childrearing 
practices acted as zones of conflict, in 
which abolitionists, slaveholders, the 
imperial government, and enslaved people 
competed to control.  Enslaved women’s 
reproductive labour held symbolic and 
legal significance in British colonial 
societies as their bodies reproduced 
“blackness” and its “enslavability,” 
allowing slave owners to claim the 
offspring of their female slaves as their 
property.  It was not until the 1780s, the 
beginning of the British abolition 
campaign, in which slave owners foresaw 
an existential threat to the plantocracy and 
sought to fully capitalize on the womb to 
sustain the colonial-slave system.  From 
that point on, Anglo-Caribbean plantocra-
cies demonstrated significant interest in 
enslaved women’s reproductive labour to 
manage slave demographics but enslaved 
women often defied their masters to exert 
control over their reproductive capacities 
in “gynecological revolt”

This essay examines sources centred on 
Jamaica to argue that the wombs of 
enslaved women in the Anglo-Caribbean 
colonies were sites of colonial domination 
as slaveowners, abolitionists, and the 
imperial government fought to control it 

but were also sites of “gynecological 
revolt” as women exerted control over 
their sexuality, pregnancy, childbirth 
experience, and child-rearing process. The 
first section of this essay will describe the 
legal and ideological struggle between 
British abolitionists and slaveowners over 
slave trade abolition from the 1780s to 
1807. The debate sparked increased 
control over women’s reproductive 
capacities as abolitionists sought to frame 
women as the source of a self-replenishing 
labour force that justified the abolition of 
the slave trade. As abolitionists gained 
momentum in Britain, slaveowners began 
slave breeding projects to secure a new 
source of labour for a future without 
readily available slave imports. The 
second section begins to unravel the 
narrative that British intellectuals, parlia-
mentarians, and humanitarians were the 
sole force fighting against the slave system 
by centring enslaved women who 
challenged slavery by exerting control 
over their bodies and reproduction. 
Finally, the conclusion will tie this investi-
gation of reproductive resistance together 
and make concluding comments on the 
lack of significance slave scholarship 
places on women’s feminized, unarmed, 
sexual, bodily defiance.

To begin a discussion on women’s gyneco-
logical revolt during Britain’s Age of 
Abolition (defined in this research as the 
1760s-1833 ), abolitionist strategies to 
abolish the slave trade and slavery 

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    Turner, “Home-grown Slaves,” 39-40.
    Turner, “Home-grown Slaves,” 42.
    Turner, Contested Bodies, 23; Turner, “Home-grown Slaves,” 42.
    Turner, “Home-grown Slaves,” 43. 
    Turner, “Home-grown Slaves,” 42
 

 

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employing women’s reproductive capacity 
must be examined in relation to slaveown-
er’s interests in preserving the status quo. 
According to Sasha Turner, before the 
emergence of the abolitionist movement, 
slaveowners preferred male slaves who 
were thought to be “more versatile and 
capable of performing the sugar planta-
tions’ variously demanding agro-industrial 
tasks.”  On the other hand, slaveholders 
“reluctantly bought females for their 
Jamaican sugar estates throughout the 
seventeenth century and maintained this 
practice until the late eighteenth century” 
as enslaved women were considered less 
valuable due to their physiological needs 
during and after pregnancies, which were 
“viewed as distractions by capitalistic 
planters whose main focus was maintain-
ing productivity and profitability.”

Women’s symbolic role in reproducing the 
slave status through their reproductive 
labour was not as valued because it was 
more profitable to purchase a male adult at 
their physical prime than accommodate 
women’s pregnancies and raise their 
children. It was not until the 1780s when 
slaveowners began to reconsider the 
profitability of women’s reproductive 
labour as the abolitionist campaign began 
successfully lobbying the end of the slave 
trade. The abolition of the slave trade, 
(abolitionist activists’ first step in abolish-
ing slavery in the British Empire), strategi-
cally employed enslaved women’s repro-
ductive labour to advocate for a  

racial eugenics program that would 
supposedly make slave trading obsolete 
and sustain the plantation economy.  
Abolitionists “mobilized a particular racial 
violence against black sexuality and 
motherhood” in which control of enslaved 
women’s fertility and maternity were 
central to creating a free labouring popula-
tion that could be molded into ideal 
subject-citizens of the empire.  While most 
Jamaican slaveowners rejected the notion 
that their slaves could be reformed into 
equally free subjects, they changed their 
slave purchasing patterns to select more 
women of child-bearing age to achieve 
sex-parity and began a plantation breeding 
program to secure an alternative labour 
force.  Overall, the success of the move-
ment to abolish British slave trading was 
hinged on a program to control black 
women’s reproductive labour to reproduce 
a “working population suitable for build-
ing and sustaining the British imperial 
enterprise.”  As Turner reflects, “whether 
in slavery or antislavery rhetoric, black 
women’s bodies and their lives were 
defined by their ability to propagate 
workers for the colonial economy.”  This 
era of abolition paradoxically ushered in a 
period of anxiety fuelled violence and 
control over a previously neglected 
resource, the womb. 

The narrative of the abolitionist-plantocra-
cy struggle over enslaved women’s 
reproductive capacities to secure a stable 
post-slave trade labour force is significant 

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     Katherine Paugh, “The Curious Case of Mary Hylas: Wives, Slaves and the Limits of British Abolitionism,” 
         Slavery & Abolition 35, no. 4 (October 2, 2014): 643. 
     Paugh, “The Curious Case of Mary Hylas,” 629-630.
     Rhoda E. Reddock, “Women and Slavery in the Caribbean: A Feminist Perspective,” Latin American Perspectives 12, 
          no. 1 (January 1985): 69. 
     Paugh, “The Curious Case of Mary Hylas,” 647
     Verene A. Shepherd, “Women and the Abolition Campaign in the African Atlantic,” The Journal of Caribbean History 
          42, no. 1 (2008): 139. 
     Shepherd, “Women and the Abolition Campaign in the African Atlantic,” 142. 

 

 

 

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but not inclusive of the power and agency 
enslaved women exercised in this transi-
tion period by sabotaging the abolition-
ist-plantocracy slave breeding project. One 
aspect of this project was the attempt by 
both abolitionists and slave owners to 
encourage monogamous slave marriages 
that would subjugate female sexuality 
under the institution of marriage and 
produce racially “pure” slave children. 
However, enslaved women engaged in 
gynecological resistance by rejecting 
monogamy, having interracial relation-
ships that granted them privileged status in 
the plantation hierarchy, as well as liberat-
ing their bodies from sexual/reproductive 
slavery through marronage. Despite their 
conflicting objectives, many slaveowners, 
policymakers, and abolitionists found 
common ground in using marriage as an 
institution that would encourage slave 
reproduction, control slave sexuality 
through the practice of monogamy, and 
preserve racial purity and hierarchy in 
colonies.

In Katherine Paugh’s article, “The Curious 
Case of Mary Hylas: Wives, Slaves and 
the Limits of British Abolitionism,” the 
institution of marriage and slavery are 
revealed to share a loss of civil identity for 
married women and slaves, a kind of 
“social death” that made enslaved women 
resistant to marriage.  Rhonda Reddock 
further argues that the contempt for 
marriage among slave women was  

because “it meant extra work and being 
confined to one man” when both men and 
women often maintained multiple relation-
ships.  Moreover, enslaved women active-
ly resisted abolitionist and slaveowner 
interests in“cultivating a purely African 
plantation labour force” by having sex 
with non-African men which at times 
conferred elite status for themselves and 
their mixed-race children. Paugh asserts 
that the sexual economies of British slave 
societies “could foster vastly unequal and 
even violently exploitative relationships 
between white men and Afro-Caribbean 
women,” but interracial reproduction also 
provided rare opportunities for some 
enslaved women to “carve out a relative 
independence” from husbands, masters, 
and abolitionists.  

While some enslaved women enjoyed 
privileged lives by rejecting racial sex 
restrictions, some women’s path to gyne-
cological revolt was through marronage. 
Verene Shepherd asserts that many women 
did not give their bodies for reproduction 
or sex and chose marronage to remove 
their bodies “from the site of oppression.”  
By viewing marronage as a form of 
gynecological revolt, these women 
removed their wombs from colonial 
control. They removed an asset that 
reproduced slaves and created wealth for 
slaveowners. Their liberated bodies could 
then engage in sexual activity and repro-
ductive labour outside the institution of 

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       Kenneth Morgan, “Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica, C.1776–1834,” History 91, no. 2 (2006): 244-252. 
       Morgan, “Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica,” 245-246.
        Morgan, “Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica,” 252.
        Turner, Contested Bodies, 14.
        Turner, Contested Bodies, 14.

 

 

 

 

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of marriage, the slave breeding program, 
and the jurisdiction of the colonial-slave 
system. In sum, enslaved women’s gyne-
cological resistance involved resisting 
imperial programs to encourage slave 
marriages and sexual conformity as well 
as removing their bodies from the slavery 
system all together. 

For enslaved women who did not have the 
luxury of upward mobility through interra-
cial sex, the chance to escape the planta-
tion, or the ability to resist sexual 
violence, the slave breeding project 
advocated by abolitionists and employed 
by slaveowners resulted in pregnancies. 
However, women’s gynecological resis-
tance continued after conception as they 
exercised agency over their bodies and 
their children throughout their pregnancies 
and the child-rearing process. Many 
women chose abortion and infanticide 
while some chose to keep their babies and 
deliver them under the care of Black 
midwives and engage in African 
child-rearing practices against the wishes 
of the slaveowners. Shepherd suggests that 
enslaved women understood the implica-
tions of the abolition of the slave trade and 
acted to free their “enchained wombs” by 
refusing to bear children who would 
become slaves themselves.  Kenneth 
Morgan attests to the use of abortive 
agents or physical violence to induce 
self-abortion as well as the practice of 
maternal infanticide. Morgan claims 

that these desperate acts of resistance were 
understood within “their woeful condition 
of perpetual chattel slavery.”  These 
women asserted control over their repro-
duction to prevent their children from 
living as slaves and robbed their owners of 
their “property.”  These acts of resistance 
were often unnoticed by slaveowners as 
the reproduction rates among enslaved 
women in Jamaica was historically low 
due to the bodily and emotional damage 
caused by their tremendous workload and 
frequent abuse.  

Abortions and infanticides were difficult 
for slave owners to account for and are 
just as difficult for researchers to track as 
this form of resistance was silenced by the 
women themselves. On the other hand, a 
woman choosing to keep her child and 
cherish them is also a form of resistance in 
a society that systematically tore families 
apart for profit and discouraged familial 
bonds. When many of these women 
carried their children to term, they faced a 
choice of giving birth in their community 
with the aid of a midwife or in clinics 
operated by doctors hired by slave 
masters. Many women chose to deliver 
their babies in their communities against 
the advice of doctors who warned of 
unsafe conditions and poor midwife 
practices.  Before slaveowners took a 
special interest in reproductive labour in 
the 1780s, enslaved women and communi-
ty members held a measure of

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       Turner, Contested Bodies, 149.
       Morgan, “Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica,” 243
       Morgan, “Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica,” 243-244.
       Sasha Turner, “Slavery, Freedom, and Women’s Bodies,” Journal of Women's History 29, no. 1 (2017): 177
       Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of 
            Pennsylvania, 2016), 10. 

 

 

 

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autonomy having developed “autonomous 
social networks and customs around 
maternal and infant care.”  In choosing to 
rely on midwives and their community to 
successfully deliver their children, women 
exercised control over their bodies and 
challenged slaveowners’ power over the 
process by choosing who can touch them 
and care for their bodies/reproductive 
health.

 Lastly, following the birth of their 
children, enslaved women employed 
African child-rearing practices which 
involved nursing their children for two 
years, sometimes up to three or four years, 
which stalled their reproductive capacities. 
Morgan claims that a longer nursing 
period entailed longer lactation, which 
served as a natural means of contracep-
tion, “either through the physiological 
suppression of fertility in the mother by 
producing breast milk or through the 
social impact of constant nurturing of 
infants and consequent unavailability to 
men.”  Morgan suggests that long lactation 
periods and post-partum taboos against a 
mother's resumption of intercourse during 
the nursing period are “carry-overs from 
traditions in West African societies” and 
contributed to extensive birth-spacing 
practice among slaves.  These practices 
protected enslaved mothers’ as they were 
able to fend off rape, prevent further 
pregnancies, and attend to their children. 
Gynecological revolt is undertaken 
through many forms of resistance after 

conception, from abortion and infanticide 
to observing culturally informed maternal 
health and child-rearing practices that 
inhibit productive capacities. In the end, 
all these forms of resistance contributed to 
sabotaging the demographic goals of 
enslavers and abolitionists. 

To conclude, during the Age of Abolition, 
enslaved women’s reproductive capacities 
were increasingly significant to slaveown-
ers, abolitionists, colonial economies/soci-
eties, and the empire itself. This essay has 
examined Jamaican and British Caribbean 
sources that argue the wombs of enslaved 
women in the Anglo-Caribbean colonies 
were sites of colonial power as well as 
sites of “gynecological revolt” as women 
exercised agency over their sexuality, 
pregnancy, childbirth experience, and 
child-rearing process. This essay has 
centred the female body in slavery schol-
arship to reveal that the womb is a signifi-
cant symbol in the struggles over freedom 
and slavery.  Despite its importance, 
women’s bodily resistance is not privi-
leged in narratives on slavery and aboli-
tion. While women have long participated 
in the armed struggles against slavery and 
colonialism and at times have been 
recognized in those efforts, by focusing on 
women’s bodies/the womb as a site of 
resistance, this essay has deconstructed 
resistance beyond imaginings of the 
“armed, militaristic, physical, and trium-
phant” struggle “particularly resonant in 
the Caribbean” and privileged the femi-
nine, unarmed, clandestine, sexual, bodily 
resistance as revolutionary. 

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Fuentes, Marisa. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive. 
           Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2016.
Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. 
           Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 
Morgan, Kenneth. “Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica, C.1776–1834.” 
           History 91, no. 2 (2006): 1-252. 
Paugh, Katherine. “The Curious Case of Mary Hylas: Wives, Slaves and the Limits of 
           British Abolitionism,” Slavery & Abolition 35, no. 4 (October 2, 2014): 629-647.
Reddock, Rhoda E. “Women and Slavery in the Caribbean: A Feminist Perspective.” 
           Latin American Perspectives 12, no. 1 (January 1985): 69. 
Shepherd, Verene A. “Women and the Abolition Campaign in the African Atlantic.” 
           The Journal of Caribbean History 42, no. 1 (2008): 139-142.
Turner, Sasha. Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica. 
            Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
Turner, Sasha. “Home-grown Slaves: Women, Reproduction, and the Abolition of the 
            Slave Trade, Jamaica 1788-1807.” Journal of Women's History 23, no. 3 (2011): 
            23-43.
Turner, Sasha. “Slavery, Freedom, and Women’s Bodies.” Journal of Women's History 29, 
             no. 1 (2017): 177.

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