Jennifer Morgan

Shelly Eversley

During the past thirty years, controversies have raged over the associations among women's bodies, sex, and questions of women's liberation. Through critical essays, fiction, poetry, and images, this provocative issue draws on the expertise of a variety of disciplines to explore a range of topics, including soul food, the works of performance artist Sarah Jones, photographer Renee Cox, filmmaker Spike Lee, dance hall music, and the history of slavery, as it reveals how women's bodies have been portrayed and how society views, discusses, and practices sex today.

WSQ: Spring / Summer 2007

The Sexual Body

When black women were brought from Africa to the New World as slave laborers, their value was determined by their ability to work as well as their potential to bear children, who by law would become the enslaved property of the mother's master. In Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan examines for the first time how African women's labor in both senses became intertwined in the English colonies. Beginning with the ideological foundations of racial slavery in early modern Europe, Laboring Women traverses the Atlantic, exploring the social and cultural lives of women in West Africa, slaveowners' expectations for reproductive labor, and women's lives as workers and mothers under colonial slavery. Challenging conventional wisdom, Morgan reveals how expectations regarding gender and reproduction were central to racial ideologies, the organization of slave labor, and the nature of slave community and resistance. Taking into consideration the heritage of Africans prior to enslavement and the cultural logic of values and practices recreated under the duress of slavery, she examines how women's gender identity was defined by their shared experiences as agricultural laborers and mothers, and shows how, given these distinctions, their situation differed considerably from that of enslaved men. Telling her story through the arc of African women's actual lives—from West Africa, to the experience of the Middle Passage, to life on the plantations—she offers a thoughtful look at the ways women's reproductive experience shaped their roles in communities and helped them resist some of the more egregious effects of slave life. Presenting a highly original, theoretically grounded view of reproduction and labor as the twin pillars of female exploitation in slavery, Laboring Women is a distinctive contribution to the literature of slavery and the history of women.

Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery

Laboring Women

Presents a history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the formation of Earth, in the form of a letter written by the thirteen-billion-year-old universe itself to an Earth child.

The Universe Tells Our Cosmic Story

Born with a Bang, Book One

Legacy of Faith

Dana Lynne Andersen

Born with a Bang

Ona Bloom

An introduction to the human brain discusses how the nervous system relates and processes information, and how its parts can be damaged and repaired.

Cells of the Nervous System

El río Okenku y otros cuentos africanos

In the early hours of October 14, 1942, under cover of darkness, the German submarine U-69 torpedoed and sank the passenger ferry SS Caribou off the southwest coast of Port aux Basques, Newfoundland.Now, seventy years later, writer and artist Jennifer Morgan recreates that eventful night in full colour. These vivid illustrations, in comic book form, bring the history and aftermath of the Caribou's final voyage to life for a whole new generation of readers.

Jennifer Morgan

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