African child-spacing practices were broken by threats of violence

Evidence

During the early years of slavery, breeding of African women was a difficult process. In traditional African communities black women suckled their children at their breasts and weaned them at the late age of two years old. For this time period, the African woman did not engage in sexual intercourse and consequently spaced her pregnancies. This practice allowed women time to recuperate physically before starting a new pregnancy. White slaveowners could not understand the reasons slave women did not bear many children consecutively. Their response to this situation was to use threats of violence as a means of coercing slave women to reproduce. — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 120

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Pre-colonial sub-Saharan child-rearing framed the child as bringing something sacred rather than needing correction — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 4228; the MOC “The Schoolroom That Unmade Them: Contact, Correction, and the Colonized Child”