Sasha Turner
Dr. Mary Fissell and Dr. Sasha Turner sit down to discuss Doll, who worked as an enslaved midwife in Barbados on an estate known for high birth rates. She was valuable and powerful working at threshold between life and death to deliver babies into bondage at a time when the future of slavery in Barbados depended on enslaved women bearing children and midwives delivering care.
Unlike many other plantations throughout the Caribbean that depended on the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans to replenish its laborers, enslavers in Barbados relied on the carework of local women. As an enslaved woman who produced no written records, the secrets of her craft remain unknown but the results are unmistakable.
Doll was revered among white and black families and hosted community gatherings at her home. She was a mother and grandmother; a sister to two siblings; and an aunt and grandaunt.
Although the work of enslaved midwives like Doll became the lifeblood of slavery, they also threaded the bonds kinship and community that enriched the life of the enslaved.
Further Reading
Beckles, Hilary, Centering Women, Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slavery, (Ian Randle Publishers, 1998).
de Barros, Juanita, Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery, (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
Innis, Tara A. "Any elderly, sensible, prudent woman": The Practice and Practitioners of Midwifery during Slavery in the British Caribbean" in Health and Medicine in the circum-Caribbean, 1800–1968, edited by Juanita de Barros and Steven Palmer, (Routledge, 2015): 40-52.
Morgan, Jennifer. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
Paton, Diana. “Gender History, Global History, and Atlantic Slavery: On Racial Capitalism and Social Reproduction,” American Historical Review 127, no. 2 (2022): 726–754.
Paugh, Katherine. The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition, (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Turner, Sasha. Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing and Slavery in Jamaica, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
Watson, Karl. A Kind of Right to be Idle: Old Doll, Matriarch of the Newton Plantation. (Department of History, UWI / Barbados Museum and Historical Society, Barbados, 2000).