Kinship, Cooking and Childcare: Older Enslaved Women’s Labor of Care in the Antebellum US South

Older enslaved women in the nineteenth-century US South performed vital work—designated under the label of ‘care’—in supervising infants and children whose mothers labored elsewhere, as well as cooking collective meals for enslaved people. Tasking older women (sometimes assisted by girls) with preparing and serving communal-style meals to enslaved children and adults formed an important part of enslavers’ capitalistic moves towards regimented, institutional modes of cooking and food consumption, as well as childcare. This increased regimentation affected kinship. Older women ‘othermothered’ children not biologically their own by performing physically arduous and mentally demanding caring labor, sometimes alongside enslaved wetnurses and younger girls. These women often cared deeply for these children, but the challenges of their work meant they sometimes struggled to adequately provide for them, and they must have resented their coerced labor. However, when women cooked of their own volition in the relatively private environments of the quarters’ family-based cabins, they regarded caring labor differently. Here, care and nurture served as a source of pleasure and pride. Enslaved women hence recognized the duality of their caring labor as both a chore and also a manifestation of love. This contrasts with enslavers’ perceptions of women’s ability to prepare and cook food for their immediate and extended families as a ‘privilege’ they could readily take away from them.