Maternal absence, communities, and the care of children under slavery in the antebellum South

This article uses Federal Writers’ Project interviews with formerly enslaved African Americans to examine the care of enslaved children living without their mothers. While enslaved people provided essential care for such children and forged meaningful relationships, caregiving networks bore strains, gaps, and coercive pressures often muted in scholarship on collective childrearing practices. Maternal absence brings these tensions into focus, offering a lens inward, into children’s multifaceted experiences of care, and outward, to the workings of enslaved communities. It also reveals enslavers’ powerful roles in shaping and exploiting care. This reframes collective childrearing as resilient but also constrained, contingent, and contested.