"This article examines antislavery authors’ attempts in the 1850s to fictionalize the Margaret Garner story of slave infanticide as a means of converting northern white readers to the antislavery cause. In their attempts to gain sympathy for an enslaved female protagonist who had murdered her own child, these authors confronted strong cultural beliefs about femininity, motherhood, and blackness. Almost uniformly, their strategy involved lightening the skin of the main character and presenting the killing of her child as a form of suicide. Nevertheless, the intense emotions surrounding the slavery issue by the mid‐1850s also led these authors to endow their fictional slave women with an aggressiveness that challenged contemporary social boundaries for women."
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Original Language: English
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Roth, Sarah N. "‘The Blade Was in My Own Breast’: Slave Infanticide in 1850s Fiction." American Nineteenth Century History8, no. 2 (2007):169-185.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Enslaved_women's_resistance_in_the_United_States_and_Caribbean
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Enslaved women's resistance in the United States and Caribbean
Enslaved women were expected to maintain the enslaved populations, which led women to rebel against this expectation via contraception and abortions. Infanticide was also committed as a means to protect children from either becoming enslaved or from returning to enslavement.
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