Bound To Care
- Amelie Pelletier
- Jan 15
- 17 min read
Black Women’s Care Labour From Plantation to Profession
Introduction
In Beloved, Toni Morrison captures the paradox of Black life under slavery through Sethe’s reflection: “Slave life; free life- every day was a test and a trial. Nothing could be counted on in a world where even when you were a solution you were the problem.” [1] This line encapsulates the instability and brutality of enslavement and the psychic toll it imposed, especially in Black women, whose identities were simultaneously denied and indispensable. Within this contradiction, their role as caretakers emerged as both vital and exploitative: they were expected to nurture the very systems that dehumanized them.
This legacy did not end with emancipation. The caregiving work that Black women performed under slavery—nursing, midwifery, childcare, domestic labour, and healing—formed the foundations of what we now understand as care labour. Broadly defined, care labour encompasses paid and unpaid work that sustains physical, emotional, and developmental needs. Though essential, such labour has historically been dismissed as unskilled and feminine, making it undervalued and poorly compensated. For Black women, this devaluation has always been racialized, rooted in coerced plantation labour and persisting in their marginalization within modern care professions.
This study examines the transformation of Black women’s care work from the plantation to the post-emancipation labour market. Drawing on historians such as Jacqueline Jones, Elizabeth Higginbotham, and Tera Hunter, it explores how caregiving skills cultivated under slavery were later formalized in domestic service, nursing, teaching, childcare, and midwifery. It also interrogates the structural racism and gender hierarchies that both enabled and constrained this process. Beginning with enslaved women’s caregiving roles, the paper traces continuities through Reconstruction and into the twentieth century, as care labour became institutionalized. It concludes by reflecting on the long-term implications of this history, arguing that Black women’s care work reveals crucial intersections of race, gender, and labour. Although often exploitative, it also constituted a form of resistance and community-building. Through care, Black women sustained one another, forged kinship networks, and redefined survival and dignity in a world built on their subjugation.
Care Work on the Plantation
Southern plantations were microcosms of racial and gendered power. A white male master presided over the “Big House,” where enslaved labourers worked as domestic servants or in the fields cultivating cotton and tobacco. Enslaved people were legally denied personhood and forced into relentless, unpaid labour for their owners’ profit. Every aspect of life was oriented toward maximizing economic gain, including reproduction, as children were considered new property. Enslaved women often performed both field and domestic work, blurring gendered divisions of labour.
As Jacqueline Jones observes, “productivity and profit” took precedence over “sentimental platitudes about the female constitution.”[2] Women lifted heavy loads, tended livestock, and endured the same 14-hour days as men during peak harvest seasons. Even this grueling labour was perversely justified as beneficial: one Mississippi planter claimed, “labor is conducive to health; a healthy woman will rear most children.”[3] The female body was thus instrumentalized as both worker and reproducer: its “health” valued only for the property it could produce.
After fieldwork, women continued with domestic duties such as cleaning cabins, cooking, washing, mending clothes, and caring for children. These nightly labours were essential for survival, as owners rarely provided adequate food or clothing. Collective tasks like laundry or cooking often became communal events that fostered solidarity and what scholars have called “gendered camaraderie.”[4] Such cooperation allowed women to share burdens, exchange knowledge, and strengthen community bonds— what Jones identifies as the “most immediate and attainable steps toward freedom,” even within bondage [5]. Women’s domestic work also had economic and educational dimensions. Families who pooled resources could achieve limited independence, accumulating small property or goods where permitted [6]. Through these acts of cooperation, enslaved women built networks of trust, loyalty, and shared purpose that preserved community life. Female elders cared for infants, midwives delivered babies, and healers created medicines which were all forms of unpaid care that sustained enslaved society. Through songs, rituals, and storytelling, women transmitted cultural knowledge and spiritual strength to future generations [7].
Child-rearing was another arena of resistance. Enslaved parents instilled moral values that subverted the logic of slavery, for example, teaching that theft from an owner was not a sin but a refusal of injustice [8]. They educated children through songs, riddles, and chores, passing on survival skills and lessons in dignity. Despite exhaustion and surveillance, some women secretly taught literacy— an illegal but powerful act of empowerment [9]. As Jacqueline Jones noted, these efforts preserved communities and equipped them with the values and skills necessary for freedom [10].
Domestic service in the Big House presented a different set of challenges. It offered marginal comforts, such as better food or clothing, but exposed women to constant surveillance and abuse. The story of Mingo White’s mother, who simultaneously served as maid, cook, spinner, weaver, and laundress under threat of the lash, exemplifies this crushing workload [11]. Wet nurses, often forced to neglect their own infants to nourish white babies, embodied the most intimate form of coerced care [12]. As well, working in close proximity to enslavers left women vulnerable to physical and sexual violence [13].
Historians have debated whether enslaved women could prioritize their own families amid such demands. Stevenson argues that they “could not give the needs of her husband and children great attention.”[14] Yet even within these constraints, women carved out an emotional and educational space for their families. Their ability to teach, nurture, and resist reflected remarkable resilience. Some scholars suggest that these experiences of managing dual obligations, caring for their own families while serving others, prepared women for post-emancipation realities of paid domestic labour.
Proximity to white households also created opportunities for subtle resistance. Women appropriated food, feigned illness, or negotiated lighter duties to protect themselves and others [15]. They developed bargaining skills, resourcefulness, and an understanding of employer–employee dynamics that would later prove essential in navigating paid labour markets [16]. In all these ways, enslaved women’s care work combined exploitation with ingenuity, laying the groundwork for both survival and future professionalism.
Care Work During the Civil War (1861-1865)
The Civil War marked a turning point in the history of Black women’s labour. The mixture of exploitation and resilience experienced under slavery shaped how formerly enslaved women adapted to wartime upheaval. When Union armies advanced across the South, many enslaved people fled to their camps— over 500,000 by war’s end. There, women leveraged skills learned on plantations to support their families and communities in exile.
Union officials employed many of these women as laundresses and cooks— roles that reflected traditional care work but now came with small wages and rations [17]. Known as “company women,” they were indispensable to the army’s functioning and often acted as informal nurses in refugee camps, where disease spread rapidly due to overcrowding and poor sanitation. While men were conscripted as soldiers, women sustained the daily life of these temporary settlements by cooking, mending, and caring for the sick. Some women, drawing on plantation skills such as sewing and herbal medicine, created systems of mutual aid and instruction. In several camps, formerly enslaved seamstresses were paid by charitable organizations to teach sewing to other refugees, producing clothes for women and children [18]. These acts of self-organization transformed camp life: women maintained traditional songs and prayers, founded orphanages and hospitals, and ran schools supported by northern aid societies and the Freedmen’s Bureau. For many, these camps provided the first experience of paid labour and a space to redefine care work as both economic survival and community service [19].
However, discrimination still persisted. Black women nurses were often confined to treating Black or infectious patients and were rarely granted the formal title of “nurse.”[20] Financial instability compounded this inequity— many went unpaid for months despite petitions to military authorities [21]. Yet their contributions were foundational: the humanitarian labour of enslaved and freed Black women during the war demonstrated both the continuity and transformation of care work, shifting it from coerced servitude to waged but still undervalued labour.
Care Work and Reconstruction
The end of the Civil War brought formal emancipation but not true freedom. As Angela Davis notes, “As slaves, compulsory labor overshadowed every other aspect of women’s existence,” and this centrality of work persisted after 1865 [22]. The transition to a free labour market did not erase exploitation— it reconfigured it. Freedwomen initially sought employment in agriculture as sharecroppers or tenant farmers, but racial violence and economic coercion soon drove many into urban domestic labour [23].
In southern cities, Black women found that the domestic work available to them bore striking resemblance to their former servitude. As Tera Hunter writes, “virtually all black women were compelled to find jobs as household workers once they arrived in the city.”[24] Low wages, long hours, and abusive employers mirrored the conditions of slavery. Yet now, women could at least exercise agency by quitting, a radical act of self-determination previously impossible [25]. This newfound autonomy, however limited, allowed women to resist exploitation by asserting control over their labour, refusing tasks, and prioritizing family responsibilities when necessary.
Despite systemic barriers, Reconstruction fostered an expansion of communal care structures that carried forward the ethos of mutual aid from slavery. Black churches, schools, and benevolent societies became central to community life. Women worked as teachers, caretakers, and organizers, linking personal survival to collective uplift. Literacy, once forbidden, became a cornerstone of freedom. Newly literate women often taught others, nurturing an intergenerational culture of education. As Jacqueline Jordan Irvine and Lisa Hill note, Black women’s transition “from plantation to schoolhouse” marked not only professional advancement but also a redefinition of care as intellectual and moral guidance [26].
The concept of othermothering, where women share responsibility for raising children beyond their biological kin, emerged as a key feature of post-emancipation for Black communities [27]. Rooted in slavery-era kinship networks, othermothering reflected both necessity and cultural solidarity. Through churches and clubs, women extended care to orphans, students, and neighbours, maintaining communal survival in the face of poverty and segregation. By the late nineteenth century, these collective practices gave rise to Black women’s clubs that institutionalized care work through education and charity. They founded kindergartens and day nurseries for the children of working mothers, which was especially vital since white-run facilities excluded Black children [28]. Their efforts paralleled white women’s reform clubs but often went further, addressing both gender and racial inequality [29]. Through such organizations, Black women professionalized their caregiving labour while using it as a tool for racial uplift and feminist activism.
During the Jim Crow era, these networks expanded into the founding of Black colleges and women’s educational institutions. Between 1920 and 1930, such schools often emphasized practical training (education, nursing, and domestic science) tailored to the realities of segregation [30]. Teaching and nursing became the most respected professions available to Black women, combining economic survival with community service. As Stephanie Shaw observes, these women were not merely educators or nurses but “political and social leaders in the formal and informal movements of the larger group.”[31]
From the plantation to Reconstruction, Black women’s care labour evolved from coerced servitude to organized community leadership. The same skills once exploited for profit became tools for liberation. Their unpaid and underpaid care work forged educational systems, health networks, and mutual aid organizations that would sustain Black communities for generations.
Nursing and Midwifery: From Plantation to Profession
Among the most visible legacies of enslaved women’s caregiving was the emergence of nursing and midwifery as professional pathways. Many Black women who had provided care in bondage, transformed that experience into skilled labour in the decades after emancipation. Two of the most prominent examples, Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) and Harriet Tubman (1820-1913), embody this trajectory. Truth had served as a nurse while enslaved and later worked at Freedmen’s Hospital, where she advocated for the training of Black nurses [32]. Tubman, too, drew on the remedies and herbal knowledge learned during slavery to nurse soldiers and civilians during the Civil War, treating diseases such as smallpox and dysentery [33]. Both women demonstrate how caregiving became a public, politicized form of service that intertwined healing with activism.
The contributions of the so-called “Black Angels” in the mid-nineteenth century further highlight the moral and physical sacrifices of Black nurses. These women tended to over two thousand tuberculosis patients when white nurses refused to do so, risking their lives in the process [34]. Yet, despite such heroism, their efforts remained largely unacknowledged. The historical pattern of erasure surrounding Black women’s care work persisted as nursing became professionalized, often through exclusionary, white-controlled institutions.
A similar pattern marked the transition of midwifery from community practice to a medical profession. Enslaved midwives had long been essential figures on plantations, delivering both Black and white infants and offering prenatal care grounded in African and folk medical knowledge. Women like Mildred Graves of Virginia were renowned for their skill and trustworthiness [35]. However, as medicine became formalized, male physicians sought to displace midwives by branding them “illiterate” and “unscientific” [36]. In the process, centuries of accumulated female expertise were dismissed, and the status of midwives, especially Black women, declined sharply.
Despite professional marginalization, midwifery remained central to Black community health. Pregnancy and childbirth represented one of the few “female spheres” where women could exercise authority and solidarity across class and colour lines [37]. During and after the Civil War, midwives and nurses affiliated with the Freedmen’s Bureau provided vital medical care to freedpeople who were excluded from white hospitals. However, as segregation hardened under Jim Crow, Black midwives became confined to serving only Black patients, even as their services remained indispensable. Their expertise, rooted in community trust and intergenerational knowledge, preserved traditions of healing that bridged the plantation past and modern medical practice [38]. Black women’s persistence in these roles, despite systemic devaluation, underscores the dual nature of care work as both a site of exploitation and a means of empowerment. Their labour sustained life under impossible conditions and carved out professional identities within restrictive systems. From the fields to the hospital wards, they transformed necessity into vocation.
Care Professions, Injustice, and Precarity
Care work has historically been framed as an extension of women’s “natural” nurturing instincts rather than as a skilled labour deserving of fair recognition. This perception, grounded in patriarchal and racial hierarchies, has rendered care both invisible and indispensable. For Black women, the burden of this devaluation is twofold: they have been expected to care for others, especially white families and institutions, while being denied care themselves [39]. The structural inequities shaping care labour persist today. Black women remain overrepresented in domestic, nursing, and childcare occupations, where they experience lower wages, longer hours, and fewer protections than their white counterparts [40]. Despite decades of labour organizing and advocacy, these professions continue to be underpaid and undervalued, reflecting what Levi Perrin describes as the long shadow of servitude that still defines care industries [41].
Recognizing this injustice requires a dual perspective. On one hand, policy and institutional reforms must challenge the systemic undervaluation of care work by ensuring equitable pay, labour protections, and access to education and advancement. On the other hand, it is vital to honour the resilience and innovation embedded in Black women’s care traditions. Even within oppressive systems, they built networks of solidarity and care that nurtured generations and sustained communities against structural neglect. As Saidiya Hartman observes, “[The Black woman’s] role has been fixed and her role is as a provider of care, which is the very mode of exploitation and indifferent use by the world, a world blind to her gifts, her intellect, her talents.” [42] This paradox— the indispensability and disposability of Black women’s labour— remains at the core of modern debates about care, justice, and labour value.
Conclusion
From the plantation to the profession, Black women’s care work reveals a continuous thread of endurance, creativity, and resistance. What began as coerced unpaid labour under slavery, evolved into the backbone of community organization, education, and health care in freedom. These women’s labour not only sustained families but also redefined the meaning of work and kinship in Black life. By tracing this history, we see that care work is not marginal but foundational to social survival. It is through care that enslaved women resisted dehumanization, that freedwomen rebuilt communities, and that modern workers continue to demand dignity.
Their legacy compels us to reevaluate whose labour society deems valuable and to acknowledge care as both a human necessity and a radical act of endurance.
To honour this lineage is to confront the systems that still exploit it and to imagine futures where care is recognized not as servitude, but as justice, power, and the cornerstone of collective survival.
Endnotes
[1] Toni Morrison, Beloved. Vintage, Reprint Editions (2004): 302.
[2] Jacqueline Jones. “‘My Mother Was Much of a Woman’: Black Women, Work, and the Family under Slavery.” Feminist Studies, Summer, 1982, Vol. 8 No. 2, Women and Work (Summer 1982): 239.
[3] Frederick Law Olmstead, A Journey in the Back Country (New York: Mason Brothers, 1860): 59.
[4] Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, “Family and Additional Labor.” Hidden Voices: Enslaved Women in the Lowcountry and U.S. South. College of Charleston. https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/hidden-voices/enslaved-womens-work/family-and-other-plantation-la
[5] Larry E. Hudson Jr. To Have and To Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina. (University of Georgia Press, 1997): 61.
[6] Ibid: 34.
[7] Jones, “My Mother Was Much of a Woman.” 41.
[8] Marie Jenkins Schwartz. “Family Life in the Slave Quarters: Survival Strategies.” OAH Magazine of History
(Summer 2001): 39.
[9] Ibid: 43.
[10] Jones, “My Mother Was Much of a Woman.” 41.
[11] U.S. Federal Writers Project, Slave Narratives Collection. Alabama Narratives. Series 1 vol 6: 416-17
[12] Stephanie E. Jones-Rodgers. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. (Yale University Press: 2019): 120.
[13] Thelma Jennings. “‘Us Colored Women Had to Go Through A Plenty’: Sexual Exploitation of African-American Slave Women.” Journal of Women’s History, Vol 1 No 3 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990): 45
[14] Brenda E. Stevenson. Life In Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South. (Oxford University Press, 1997): 162.
[15] Betty Wood “Some Aspects of Female Resistance to Chattel Slavery in Low Country Georgia, 1763-1815.” The Historical Journal, Vol 30 No 3 (1987): 618
[16] Amrita Chakrabarti Myers. “‘Sisters in Arms’: Slave Women’s Resistance to Slavery in the United States.” Past Imperfect, Vol 5 (1996): 168
[17] Amy Murrell Taylor. Embattled Freedom: Journey through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps. (University of North Carolina Press: 2018): 127
[18] Ibid, 171.
[19] Ibid, 236.
[20] Jane E. Schultz. “Seldom Thanked, Never Praised, and Scarcely Recognized: Gender and Racism in Civil War Hospitals.” Civil War History, Vol 48, No 3 (Kent State University Press, 2002): 223.
[21] Ibid, 227.
[22] Angela Davis. Women, Race, and Class. (London: Women’s Press Ltd, 1981): 5.
[23] Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, “Continuities and Changes in Women’s Lives: From Enslavement to Emancipation.” Hidden Voices: Enslaved Women in the Lowcountry and U.S. South. College of Charleston. Accessed online April 2025, https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/hidden-voices/continuities-and-changes
[24] Tera W. Hunter. To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After The Civil War. (Harvard University Press: 1997): 21.
[25] Ibid, 28.
[26] Jacqueline Jordan Irvine & Lisa B. Hill. “From Plantation to Schoolhouse: The Rise and Decline of Black Women Teachers.” Humanity & Society, Vol 14 No 3 (1990): 245.
[27] Crystasany R. Turner. “Othermothering: A Black Feminist History of Communal Early Childhood Education in America” Journal of African American Women and Girls in Education, Vol 4 No 2 (Fall 2024): 108.
[28] Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. Uncovering the Role of Early Childhood in Black Women’s Clubs. Accessed April 2025. https://cscce.berkeley.edu/publications/brief/the-role-of-early-childhood-in-black-womens-clubs-work/
[29] Ibid
[30] Bettye Collier-Thomas. “The Impact of Black Women in Education: An Historical Overview.” The Journal of Negro Education, Vol 51 No 3 (Summer 1982): 177.
[31] Stephanie J Shaw. What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era. (University of Chicago Press, 1996): 2.
[32] AT Davis & PK Davis. Early Black American Leaders in Nursing: Architects for Integration and Equality. (Jones and Bartlett Learning, 1999): 18
[33] Sarah H. Bradford. Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. (Documenting the American South, 2000): 38. Accessed April 2025, https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bradford/bradford.html
[34] Diana-Lyn Baptiste et al. “Hidden Figures of Nursing: The Historical Contributions of Black Nurses and a Narrative for those who are Unnamed, Undocumented, and Underrepresented.” Journal of Advanced Nursing, Vol 77. No 4 (April 2021): 5-6.
[35] Tanfer Emin Tunc. “The Mistress, The Midwife, and the Medical Doctor: Pregnancy and Childbirth on the Plantations in the Antebellum American South, 1800-1860.” Women’s History Review, Vol 19 No 3 (2010): 399
[36] Anna Matilda King & Melanie Pavich-Lindsay. Anna: the letters of a St. Simons Island Plantation Mistress,1817-1859. (University of Georgia Press, 2002): 8.
[37] Tunc. “The Mistress, the Midwife, and the Medical Doctor” (2010): 412
[38] Haywood L. Brown., et al. “Black women health inequity: the origin of perinatal health disparity” Journal of the National Medical Association 113, no 1 (2020).
[39] Jocelyn Frye and Areeba Haider. “Black Women and the Care Agenda: Investing in Care Priorities Advances Gender and Racial Justice.” National Partnership for Women and Families. (November 2024) Accessed online April 2025, https://nationalpartnership.org/report/black-women-and-the-care-agenda/
[40] Frye and Haider, “Black Women and the Care Agenda” (2024)
[41] Levi Perrin. “From Wash Tubs to Union Halls: Black Women’s Legacy in the Labor Movement” Unerased (Word In Black, 2025). Accessed online https://wordinblack.com/2025/02/black-women-labor-movement/
[42] Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors.” A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. Vol 18 No 1 (2016): 171.
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