User:Caitlands/sandbox

Personal Life

Jennifer Lyle Morgan is the daughter of John P. (professor of pharmacology at the City University of New York Medical School) and Claudia B. (former project director for the Settlement Housing Fund for the City of New York) Morgan. She married Herman Lee Bennett (a historian) in 1993. [1] Her degrees include Oberlin College, where she received her B.A. in 1986 and Duke University, Ph.D. in 1996. She formerly taught history and women's and gender studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her field of study is the United States. [2] Her research interests include Early African American History, Comparative Slavery, Histories of Racial Ideology, and Women and Gender. Her research examines the intersections of gender and race in colonial America. [3] She currently lectures Gender and Slavery in the Atlantic World, Partus Sequitur Ventrum: Slave Law and the Histories of Women in Slavery, Race and Reproduction, and ’Their Great Commoditie:’ Gender, Commodification, and the Origins of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. She is affiliated externally with the American Historical Association, Berkshire Conference of Women's Historians, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in New World Slavery

She has written the book Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in New World Slavery. It examines how African women's labor in both senses became intertwined in the English colonies. Beginning with the ideological foundations of racial slavery in early modern Europe, Laboring Women traverses the Atlantic, exploring the social and cultural lives of women in West Africa, slaveowners' expectations for reproductive labor, and women's lives as workers and mothers under colonial slavery. [4] Presenting a highly original, theoretically grounded view of reproduction and labor as the twin pillars of female exploitation in slavery, Laboring Women is a distinctive contribution to the literature of slavery and the history of women. Challenging conventional wisdom, Morgan reveals how expectations regarding gender and reproduction were central to racial ideologies, the organization of slave labor, and the nature of slave community and resistance. Taking into consideration the heritage of Africans prior to enslavement and the cultural logic of values and practices recreated under the duress of slavery, she examines how women's gender identity was defined by their shared experiences as agricultural laborers and mothers, and shows how, given these distinctions, their situation differed considerably from that of enslaved men. Telling her story through the arc of African women's actual lives—from West Africa, to the experience of the Middle Passage, to life on the plantations—she offers a thoughtful look at the ways women's reproductive experience shaped their roles in communities and helped them resist some of the more egregious effects of slave life. Her work is also featured in Women in Early America. She is currently at work on a project that considers colonial numeracy, racism, and the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, tentatively entitled “Accounting for the Women in Slavery".

Articles

She has written articles including “Gender and Family Life,” in The Slavery Reader, ed. Trevour Bernard and Gad Heuman (New York: Routledge, forthcoming, 2010), “Experiencing Black Feminism,” in Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower, ed. Deborah Gray White, (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2007), The Sexual Body: The Women’s Studies Quarterly, 35 (Spring/ Summer 2007), edited with Shelley Eversley, “Why I Write,” in Why We Write: The Politics and Practice of Writing for Social Change, Jim Downs ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), “Sex, Race, and the Colonial Project,” with Kirsten Fischer, in The William and Mary Quarterly, 60 (January 2003): 197-99, “Slavery and the Slave Trade, 1600-1760,” in A Companion to American Women’s History, Nancy Hewitt ed. (Malden, Mass and London: Blackwell, 2002), “‘Some Could Suckle Over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, LIV (January 1997): 167-92.

Ben Franklin's World

She is featured in the podcast series Ben Franklin’s World. [5] Each episode features a conversation with a historian who helps to shed light on important people and events in early American history. The episode she is a part of, named “Doing History”, introduces historians who tell what they know about the past and reveal how they came to their knowledge. The topics include: the daily lives of enslaved African and African American women in early America, differences between the experiences of enslaved men and women, the impact slavery had on early American women’s lives, whether slave owners tried to control the reproductive capabilities of female slaves, how women impacted the development of slavery, how Europeans used the bodies of women to mark the boundaries of African and European societies, how Jennifer started her research for Laboring Women, Jennifer’s research process and how it has matured, the role historical questions play in historians’ research, how historians form historical questions, how Jennifer chooses archives for her research, how historians use the internet to research their topics, how Jennifer researches enslaved women, how enslaved women experienced motherhood, the role of objectivity in historians’ research, how Jennifer handles researching and teaching the emotional and violent topic of slavery, how being interdisciplinary helps Jennifer think about and find information, and Jennifer’s tips for selecting archives and conducting research.