ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

Black Milk: Maternal Bodies, Wet Nursing and the Value of Black Women’s Invisible Labor in the Antebellum Slave Market

Historians who study motherhood in the antebellum South frame white slaveholding women’s decisions to use enslaved wetnurses as matters of necessity. In their view, white mothers used enslaved wet nurses as a last resort, not because they were readily available. Yet white women’s decisions to procure the services of enslaved wet nurses had economic implications and destructive consequences for enslaved women’s relationships with their children. Drawing upon slave narratives, slaveholders’ correspondence, and nineteenth-century southern newspapers, this paper examines the market that white southern mothers created for enslaved wetnurses and the ways that this market intersected with southern slave marketplaces in the antebellum era. It contends that white women were crucial to the commodification of enslaved mothers’ breast milk and the nutritive and maternal care they provided to white children and in so doing, white women may have enhanced enslaved women’s values in southern slave markets. It also argues that slavery and the slave market transformed enslaved mothers’ ability to suckle into a form of invisible skilled labor. It shows that white women’s decisions to borrow, hire, or buy enslaved wetnurses often broke the already fragile, yet sacred bonds enslaved mothers had with their children, and caused familial trauma within enslaved communities. In all of these ways, this paper sheds light upon the informal and formal markets through which enslaved mothers circulated, it examines the roles white women played in these markets, and it attempts to challenge prevailing conceptualizations of skilled labor in the context of slavery in the antebellum South.