‘The Blade Was in My Own Breast’: Slave Infanticide in 1850s Fiction

This article examines antislavery authors’ attempts in the 1850s to fictionalize the Margaret Garner story of slave infanticide as a means of converting northern white readers to the antislavery cause. In their attempts to gain sympathy for an enslaved female protagonist who had murdered her own child, these authors confronted strong cultural beliefs about femininity, motherhood, and blackness. Almost uniformly, their strategy involved lightening the skin of the main character and presenting the killing of her child as a form of suicide. Nevertheless, the intense emotions surrounding the slavery issue by the mid‐1850s also led these authors to endow their fictional slave women with an aggressiveness that challenged contemporary social boundaries for women.     

Born in the U.S.A.: citizenship acquisition and transnational mothering in Turkey

This article explores the practice of giving birth in the U.S. for the purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for the newborn children, among upper and upper-middle class mothers who otherwise are permanently located in Turkey. Focusing on their motivations, anxieties and practices, we situate our analysis with respect to discussions of intensive mothering, transnational motherhood and multi-layered meanings of citizenship. We suggest that the motivations women have for traveling to and staying in the U.S. in the later stages of their pregnancy reveal a new terrain of intensive mothering, tied to locally specific perceptions of future unpredictability and restrictions on individual choice. This particular discourse of intensive mothering involves the promotion of individualistic-decision-making and individualized efforts to control macro-processes, and reveals how citizenship acquisition for the children reproduces and disguises inequalities at the transnational level. Yet, this is also an intensely emotional process, not only indicative of the pressures on mothers, but also women’s multilayered conflicts of belonging and identity across spaces and scales of citizenship.     

Conscripting the breast: lactation,slavery and salvation in the realms of Aragon and kingdom of Majorca,c. 1250–1300

This essay examines the ideals and practices surrounding motherhood and wet nursing in the realms of Aragon and kingdom of Majorca c. 1250–1300. Despite powerful messages — from ecclesiastical pronouncements to lay devotional manuals to artwork in churches — that linked maternal breastfeeding to an educative and caring ideal of mothering, social and economic pressures on wealthy urban and knightly women to remain as sexually available and as fecund as possible caused a shift to increased use of wet nurses, many of whom were of Muslim origin. Although the latter would have been nominally baptized, in practice, if not normative legal ideal, they maintained their enslaved status no matter how many children they bore. Indeed, it is possible that such women's bodies were doubly exploited: first, as sexual chattel available to their masters and other men, and then, having been made pregnant, as nursing mothers whose own children could be put away in favour of their mistresses'. Only fragmentary examples of such women ‘conversing’ with one another have been found, but the observations offered here open up to the historian's view a social scenario in which we know many conversations among women must have taken place.     

Building Bridges of Memory: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Cultural Politics of Maternal Memories

In this article, I explore the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo as a site through which social memories are transmitted and connected to the realities of Argentina’s present. The conjuncture or disjuncture between people’s direct and individual memories of the past, their memory of the society’s collective past, and the “official” history can be used as a prism for seeing how power, and resistance, work through and reinforce a complex political economy. By giving testimony and re‐contextualizing the events of the dictatorship, the Mothers have been able to challenge the historical narratives of the state and construct competing ones. Furthermore, the present‐day activism and goals of the Mothers, as individuals and as a collective, are based on political commitments that have arisen in great part out of maternal relationships and maternal memories. Their maternal memories have led to a re‐signification of neoliberalism as a type of structural violence.     

Conscripting the breast: lactation,slavery and salvation in the realms of Aragon and kingdom of Majorca,c. 1250–1300

This essay examines the ideals and practices surrounding motherhood and wet nursing in the realms of Aragon and kingdom of Majorca c. 1250–1300. Despite powerful messages — from ecclesiastical pronouncements to lay devotional manuals to artwork in churches — that linked maternal breastfeeding to an educative and caring ideal of mothering, social and economic pressures on wealthy urban and knightly women to remain as sexually available and as fecund as possible caused a shift to increased use of wet nurses, many of whom were of Muslim origin. Although the latter would have been nominally baptized, in practice, if not normative legal ideal, they maintained their enslaved status no matter how many children they bore. Indeed, it is possible that such women's bodies were doubly exploited: first, as sexual chattel available to their masters and other men, and then, having been made pregnant, as nursing mothers whose own children could be put away in favour of their mistresses'. Only fragmentary examples of such women ‘conversing’ with one another have been found, but the observations offered here open up to the historian's view a social scenario in which we know many conversations among women must have taken place.