“Called on Every Hand”: Enslaved Midwives & Spaces of Work in Early America

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This paper follows the life and work of Hannah, an enslaved woman who practiced as a midwife in North Carolina until her Quaker enslaver tried to manumit her in 1777. Through her work as a midwife, Hannah traveled the physical terrain of the Albemarle Sound, entered intimate spaces to assist both white and Black mothers in childbirth, worked through the liminal space between birth and death, and endured the tenuous space of white legacy. Enslaved midwives across the early American south navigated these complex spaces that pulled them through differing forms of collaboration and conflict. The petition to manumit Hannah in 1777 provides a window into those paradoxical spaces that midwifery work required enslaved women to inhabit, as well as the precarious spectrum of slavery and freedom itself during the era of the American Revolution.

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