Is This Caused by Gender?

The American Slave Coast, focused as it is on slave-breeding and the domestic slave trade, cannot avoid addressing certain matters such as actual birthing.  One of the themes runs something like this: when all women, even the most elite and privileged women, have no rights to their own bodies, no legal standing to refuse sexual advances, predation, abuse and rape from their own husbands -- and even their husband's friends*, have no control over their reproduction, are shamed and blamed if they do not reproduce to the extreme of their reproductive capacity, when obstetrics were brutal when they existed at all, and the consequences are frequent and early death for both woman and infant -- what do you think it was like for the most powerless of all women, an enslaved, fertile woman?  She is certainly not receiving adequate nutrition, doesn't even have a bed frame or floorboards in many cases, is overworked right up to and rapidly after birth.

But we needed to do some fact checking on some statements we've made, such as the enslaved frequently followed the birthing practice of many African cultures, squatting in the later stages of labor and the birth, which also helped expel the placenta-afterbirth more rapidly and completely, while white women did not do that.

Well, now, is that a fact, or is it a supposition merely?  How do you find out?

Due to a computer problem my search privileges in my research library consortium were temporarily revoked.  No access.  El V couldn't find a thing: every search defaulted to present day Africa, African American, American, African birthrates, maternity care, etc.  He couldn't find anything that addressed birthing practices in the pre-Civil War south.  As this is was such an intimate matter, and one that was considered obscene -- no decent woman would be talking about this, much less keeping track and writing about it -- much less a man, who was interested only in the child arriving and living and increasing his wealth.**



When I was able to get back into the research libraries' resources and typed in a string, which I think was -- birthing slaves antebellum south. Voila, though the body of research published in this area is small, there is a group of dedicated historians who have been working to compile the information and stats. One title in particular, is a whole book, published in 2006, and is on the shelves here locally at Bobst.  Now we can confirm the statements as false or fact:  Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South, by Marie Jenkins Schwarz.

El V is a grand champion searcher. But he didn't get this, when I was able to on first try. Is it that he just didn't have the gender intuition of the right string of terms?
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*  For notable example, Thomas Jefferson attempted "to seduce" forcibly, i.e. rape, the wife of one of his closest friends -- full account in Meacham's The Art of Power, an historian who deeply admires TJ.  He tried it on more than once, while his friend  was absent, in the army, and she was alone, even so much so he climbed on top of her while she was sleeping in her bedroom.  She fought him off, was terrified and disgusted to be around him for years before she told her husband, who then wanted to fight TJ in a duel, but TJ managed to placate and get away.  No way was the physically cowardly TJ capable of facing anyone in a duel.  Then, of course, he bred his wife, whom by all evidence he dearly loved, to death.

** Note, how even today right wing white southern males demonstrate nearly every time they open their mouths their complete ignorance of how reproduction, birth and all their associated systems work, as well as maintaining contemptibly stupid convictions of how these matter do operate.