Bad breeders and monstrosities: racializing childlessness and congenital disabilities in slavery and freedom

ABSTRACT

By the antebellum years, popular and professional thinking about infertility and the birth of children with congenital disabilities followed a racialized pattern that hewed to the familiar contours of the United States’ larger racial and gender ideologies that legitimized slavery. Whites routinely blamed enslaved women for these conditions through toxic, intersecting discourses about race, gender, and disability that trafficked in racist stereotypes of black women’s supposed lasciviousness and immorality. At the same time, white women of elite or middling social stature were absolved of any imagined responsibility for these very same conditions on the grounds that their pure, delicate physicality left them vulnerable and susceptible to these ‘afflictions.’