Racialised Motherhood: Documenting and Analysing Early Modern Discourses on Reproduction

Using methods from history, sociolinguistics, and digital humanities, Racialised Motherhood examines newspapers from 1600 to 1900 to analyze geographical and diachronic change on patterns of discourse about women’s reproductive roles. We examine how the reproductive capacity of women from diverse origins was discursively differentiated.

Flower. Illustration: Maria Sibylla Merian, ‘Flos Pavonis.’ In Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, 138–39. Amsterdam, 1705

The Racialised Motherhood research group works on a comprehensive trans-imperial account of how women’s reproductive roles were represented in print periodicals from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Using methods from history and natural language processing, we document and analyse geographical and diachronic change, over three centuries, on patterns of discourse about human reproduction. We examine curated corpora of newspapers and other periodicals that circulated in the British, Danish, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish Empires, on both sides of the Atlantic. Our comparative statistical historical analyses seek to expand the state of the art about early modern discourses on women’s reproductive capacities. The project aims to expose interconnected trans-imperial discursive processes of racialization of women in early print media.

Sub-projects

Debating Freedom for Children of Enslaved Women

This sub-project examines parliamentary debates, press coverage, and public discourse about laws that granted freedom to children born of enslaved mothers. Such laws could be paradoxical: they had the potential to challenge colonial slavery's foundations but were also used to delay full abolition.

Fugitive Motherhood

Examining fugitive advertisements from colonial newspapers, this sub-project focuses on the decisions that women had to make when running from slavery, with or without their children.

Nurturing and Caring for Others

Using as primary sources a combination of newspapers and archival documents, this sub-project focuses on how activities related to care were shared among women of different ethno-racial background.