Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South

This remarkably researched and thorough book on pregnancy and childbirth among enslaved African-Americans demonstrates how the most personal and intimate aspects of slaves' lives were fraught with politics and power. Schwartz, whose previous work Born in Bondage explored the lives of children under slavery, draws upon medical records, journals, letters, and WPA interviews to recreate a slave's progression from conception to birth. Her access into this intimate world is stunning, and she provides rich, challenging accounts. She contends that planters and doctors used ""biological science and learning to uphold power relations in the South,"" and indicts doctors for their complicity in white brutality on black women's bodies. In turn, black women used resistance tactics that ranged from birth control to midwifery in a struggle for control over their bodies and children. Though her thesis is familiar, the narratives Schwartz weaves create a vivid, highly detailed portrait of women's lives under slavery, in turns that are both chilling (the casual brutality of slave-owners) and awe-inspiring (the strength and bravery of the enslaved).