Understanding Blackness within Women's History

By Kate Pearson

Like spoils of war, recipe books are collections of stolen goods. Whether utilizing products of indigenous foodways or crafted in the hands of enslaved folk, these entries, like gems, still have value, but have a sordid history behind them as well. Communities across the continent of Africa such as the Gold Coast were pillaged by European enslavers for people and product; spices and foodstuffs accompanied the men, women, and children spirited across the world within the triangular trade. While these atrocities lay the foundation for the creation of recipes and the collection of household knowledge, there is often an artificial distance in order to keep scholarship intact and the continued function of colonization and capitalism. Specifically, to maintain comfortability, academic discussions divorce the producers from the product, and rarely mention enslavement and the triangular trade in the same breath as early modern domestic life. In an attempt to recognize the contributions of women, Black folks were further dehumanized and largely erased from discussion through the episteme of feminist thought. Women’s history, focusing on archival works like recipe books that reveal household dynamics and labor contributions, appeared as an area of scholarship to uplift a marginalized community. Unfortunately, the study of these recipes contributes to the archive cataloging the domestic labor of white women but simultaneously drowns out the sparse voices detailing the lives of Black women. Therefore, this essay will use selected works that discuss the institutional aspects of gendered work, the structural impact of enslavement, and its realities. This paper will use the works of Silvia Federici, Judith Carney and Richard Rosomoff, and primary sources connected to slave economies in early modern British colonies to detail how the enclosure of the domestic space and reliance on objects of so-called feminized labor contributes to the establishment of white women as the main subjects of gender studies and the relegation of Black women to the margins of women’s history.

The beginning of this negotiation between racial and gendered regimes begins on a macro-level. This relationship can best be understood through the work of Silvia Federici in her essay, “Counterplanning From the Kitchen.” She insists that housewifery is not something to be understood as a form of volunteerism, but rather an area of exploitation thanks to governmental acts under capitalism. While there is certainly a need to emphasize that Europeans, regardless of gender, were just experiencing economic reorganization, hegemonic historical analysis that delves into the experiences of women remains rooted in the home. Federici writes about the way women were undermined by the separation of “domestic labor” from wage work saying, “this exploitation has been even more effective because the lack of a wage hid it . . . where women are concerned, their labor appears to be a personal service outside of capital.” [1] For Federici, housework became key to this equation as this “personal service” upheld systems that produced the very violence that enclosed women almost entirely in the areas of the domestic. Often, scholarship around gender attempts to produce intellectual regimes capable of providing those exploited women with recognition for their work. To this end, “women’s history” emphasizes the products of gender performance. Clearly divorced from false understandings of scientific delineations of “sex,” gender as a social performance and more specifically womanhood must be examined not by who people were but rather what they did. Radtke and Stam argue this point/argue for the necessity of structural analysis, stating that, “‘"Female" and "male'' are shaped not only at the micro-level of everyday social interaction but also at the macro level as social institutions control and regulate the practices of gender.” [2] This offers a great wealth of knowledge concerning early modern Europe as the lines between private and public are blurred and household sites serve as prime microcosms of society. They provide illustrations of the influence of the church, acting economy, community, and other affecting dynamics of gender. The kitchen becomes a site bubbling with analytic potential because its domination by domesticity introduces a marriage between micro-level social interactions and macrostructures of domination. From here gender scholars pull things like recipe books, products that along with the practices that produce them were relegated into the private space but are overflowing with information that enriches public discussion. More than other products of their time, recipe books challenge the binary understanding of a public and private sphere and highlight the ways domestic gender performance is in fact demonstrative of public dynamics within spaces like religious institutions. Uplifting recipe books enters physical manifestations of gender performance and domestic labor into the archive formally as a hallmark for certain women and their impact on their own households and the wider world. This, however, is detrimental for those whose labor is not only domesticated but also racialized. In her essay “Collecting Knowledge For the Family,” Elaine Leong discusses the tangible impact of gendered labor on history in the form of recipe collection saying, “as texts created collaboratively by family collectives across gender, geographic and temporal boundaries, they extend our understanding of the multiple roles assigned to men and women within early modern households.” [3] The question of race complicates this easy equation of "collaborative" labor as the work of enslaved women can only ever appear collaborative insofar as it is not consensual. The visibility of their labor is also in question, as the same essay mentions that the evidence of women’s impact are often viewed “…. in the form of their own distinctive handwriting.” [4] Referring to the written records of recipe books, enslaved women could not participate in this communal practice or others. For example, many communal practices require familial bonds that enslaved folks were often robbed of or forced into. Additionally, the white family’s success was often predicated upon the subjugation of Black ones in order for it to function. It seems that Black women are not only excluded from professional but also personal, as their very bodies are seen as the capital aspect of the equation.

This experience of objectification has been present since Black entrance into the colonial project through slavery. This is the topic of discussion in Judith Carney and Richard Rosomoff’s work, In the Shadow of Slavery, in which they discuss the products of the triangular trade -- both productions of argiculture and the enslaved people themselves -- and their impact on colonial society stating, “Enslaved Africans and their descendants were central to the economic development of the New World. But their contributions involved far more than providing the muscle behind it. They brought critical skills and knowledge.” [5] Carney and Rosomoff do not continue the legacy of objectifying and dehumanizing enslaved people by diminishing their impact to something that is totally material. Quite the contrary, their work emphasizes the intellectual impact of enslaved people and scholars can apply this to the domestic labor within the household spaces of early modern Europe. Households feature their presence as both the laboring subject and producing subject, but this impact is undermined by the way that both labor and production are understood. For example, the work of enslaved folk resulted in products like sugar that early European households often used in recipes featured in documents such as a cookery book produced by an unknown 18th century British author. [6] Within its pages, instructions are featured on how to produce a plum cake. [7] Not only were several of its ingredients harvested by enslaved hands, the resulting recipes were most likely formed by enslaved hands as well. Databases collecting information on plantation resources, dynamics, and products reveal that next to tobacco, sugar was one of the most relied upon slave-grown products grown in British colonies in places like the Caribbean. [8] Just like the author behind 18th century cookery books, the identity of those behind the sugar’s harvest is unknown, but with intention and effort one can still identify their work. Enslaved people are written out of the historical record, but each and every recipe that was formed by their hands using the products of their exploitation stands as evidence that they lived and shaped the world.

Due to the nature of domestic labor and household support for wealthy families in early modern Europe the figures of production were most likely women as well, something that should fall under the purview of scholars of gendered history. Works like Leong’s spotlights the writings themselves rather than the work behind it. Due to the way that products of literacy like recipe books (things largely excluded from the experiences of enslaved women and other folks) are major contributors to the archive of gendered work and women’s history unfortunately, despite their major contributions to the work, Black women are once again on the outside of a foundational conversation. Enslaved women are essential but excluded from even the literary archive because of the restrictions placed on literacy make their experiences illegible. Recipe books are only possible as contributors to the archive of gendered work and women's history because they are the products of the partial expansion of literacy to white women in the early modern period.

There are scholars, however, working to center Black women’s experiences and illustrating that a interrogation of scholarship works to enrich the archive and expand its reach into previously-dismissed histories. For example, in Sasha Turner’s Home-Grown Slaves: Women, Reproduction, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Jamaica 1788-1807, she traces Black women’s participation in household production from the curing of sugar to reproductive labor. [9] This work is essential but does not entirely close the academic gap because Black women’s experiences are still usually ruled as exceptions to a white rule. Jennifer Morgan touches on this concept of exclusion in her work in terms of Black women’s behavior saying, "Europe had a long tradition of identifying Others through the monstrous physiognomy or sexual behavior of women.” [10] This argument can be further extended to not just action but also existence. The history of slavery and the history of women are studied with almost-mutual exclusivity rather than discussion in conversation, despite the fact that that would enrich arguments like Leong’s. Just as gender shaped racial experiences like during enslavement, race certainly influences gender in similar conversation.

As this paper attempts to contribute to discussions of race and gender it also breaks new ground in terms of highlighting the limits of the very scholarship it engages. Specifically, discussions of Black erasure are held to archival standards that reify the concept of exclusion through academic gatekeeping. Black contributions to things like family cookery books are understood through oral histories, household dynamics, even common sense, but these are rarely accepted as scholarly sources. Given that the illiteracy of black communities was enforced by colonial law, it is unethical to demand written evidence of enslaved experiences.

In sharp contrast to treatment of white source material, Black experiences must inevitably include discussion of white life, though the opposite is not enforced. In Amanda Herbert’s essay “Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain,” she certainly discusses class relationships to areas of domesticity, but Black relations are found not in the pages; they are relegated to a single footnote. [11] The labor exchange between European women was not binary but tertiary; lower- and higher-class women also relied on the labor of enslaved folk to operate and their household and community structures reflected this. Despite this, whiteness is upheld as the default, in which work concerning domestic spaces need not include discussions of Blackness or enslavement to be deemed responsible. Scholarship concerning domestic labor that refrains from a discussion of enslaved experiences is not just exclusionary, but also incomplete. It is not just that the academic register is unethical, but it fails in its own project by excluding Black people from its analysis as one cannot separate the white community from its reliance on Blackness. Meanwhile, scholarly discussions of Black women’s contributions must engage in whiteness to be seen as legitimate. This is a reproduction of violence for enslaved people in domestic labor exchanges and something that Black feminist scholarship such as this paper attempts to unsettle, not just avoid.

In its simplest terms, whenever an early modern recipe includes spices or sugars, it notes more than just one family’s preference but more largely, evidence of the exploitation of a people. These facts are often excluded, however, due to the wealth of knowledge captured in each generational text concerning rituals and practices of gender. The category of women’s work and by extension domestic labor are dominated less by people and more by product. The designation of a “domestic space” obscures the question of race in a way that promotes whiteness as the default, despite major Black contribution to the field. The enclosure of those aforementioned spaces further limits their potential to be uplifted in academic discourse. In an effort to construct a history of people relegated to the margins -- women -- many scholars contribute to the erasure of an even more vulnerable population -- Black folks. The attempt to alleviate women’s struggles becomes a contributing structure of erasure. Material pieces of history like recipe books are impossible to divorce from economies of labor systems and further the violences they attempt to curtail.