Motherhood, Childlessness, and the Care of Children from Slavery to Emancipation - University of Reading, Whiteknights Campus

Tuesday 19th April – Thursday 21st April 2016
Cedars Hotel and Conference Centre
University of Reading, Whiteknights Campus

Enslaved status in Atlantic societies--indeed, legal slavery since Roman times--was inherited from the mother. Yet although this legal framework made motherhood a central aspect of systems of slavery, the politics and experience of enslaved motherhood remain under-researched, and many studies of specific slave societies examine relatively isolated national or colonial contexts. This conference aims to put gender and motherhood, though women’s reproductive labour and the political significance of that labour, at the heart of an Atlantic-wide history of slavery. We seek proposals for papers that will contribute to:

• theorizing the systemic centrality of maternity to the reproduction, abolition, and legacy of systems of slavery,
• understanding the experience and politics of fertility, infertility, control (and lack of control) of reproduction, pregnancy, birth, maternity, infant feeding and the care of children, child death, and childlessness in slave societies, and
• examining motherhood as a central trope in representations of slavery, produced both from within and from outside slave societies

Programme: https://research.ncl.ac.uk/motheringslaves/events/reading/programme/


For more information on the Mothering Slaves network, please see the network’s website: https://research.ncl.ac.uk/motheringslaves/