Between Women: Breastfeeding, Social Connections & Bonds of Trust
Childcare for enslaved women was communal based and depended on a network of caregivers. Women cultivated rituals, customs, and healing practices that nourished and protected mothers and children, simultaneously enacting cultural codes of belonging and nurturing social worlds between women. Approaching childcare communally enslaved women defined motherhood as a practice that depended on gendered intimacies and commuted slavery’s social death sentence into meaningful social existence.