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Hard Labour Angela Davis Summary

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This critical reflection will focus the very interesting things that were written about women and their role in that resistance of slavery in “Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves” by Angela Davis and “Hard Labour: Women, Childbirth and Resistance in British Caribbean Slave Societies” by Barbara Bush-Slimani. Both authors focus on the fact that women are never recognized as being apart of slave revolts and sometimes are barely mentioned at all. Although both agree that there was a lot resistance on the women’s part they focus on different ways they expressed that resistance. Angela Davis speaks about visible acts of resistance and how treating black women no different than black men affected their actions. On the …show more content…

As the end of the slave trade seem to become a reality, many slave owners in the Caribbean started to try to even out slave female to male ratios. The reproductive ability of females became needed in order to keep the sugarcane industry alive. Soon enough slave owners were beginning to realize that although they were treating the females better they weren’t getting pregnant. The theory is that many African healers and women brought with them the knowledge of how to have an abortion and used it in fear of the servitude their future children would have to suffer. This was a very important act of resistance because of the power slave women took over their reproductive system. Although they had not control over their sexuality, having a child was something they knowingly decided against, while also hindering the institution of slavery that need their children to live. Overall, both writings were very interesting but I did wish that Davis would have spoken more in-depth about how and when exactly black females gained the Matriarch reputation. I also believed that Bush-Slimani’s assumption was very sound and had information like birth rates, after and before the end of slavery, that supported her ideas,

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