Praise for Ties That Bound
"Both general readers and scholars will benefit by having their knowledge rather uncomfortably enhanced by this substantive study. Highly recommended."
(Choice)
"An inventive, integrated portrait of black and white. . . . Her fierce research is distilled into engaging prose. . . . Secrets and lies ensnared these braided lives, and Ties That Bound offers vivid insight into these entangled stories."
(Catherine Clinton, Times Higher Education)
"Absorbing. . . . The story of the Founders and slavery is one of the most vexed in American history, analyzed and debated generation after generation. Ties That Bound doesn't unravel the moral or sociological underpinnings and consequences of those tangled connections, but it does contribute a fresh and valuable dimension to that long argument with its fine-grained portraits of domestic life in the South in the early republic."
(Susan Dunn, New York Review of Books)
“Schwartz wants readers to grasp how the lives and physical spaces of presidential families were “inextricably linked” to their black slaves, whether inside their Virginia great houses or the White House (p.3). . . . Ties That Bound is excellent and deserves a wide readership.”
(Phillip Hamilton, The Journal of American History)
“Schwartz’s expertise clearly shines when she is analyzing the various ways that both black female slaves and white female aristocrats negotiated the man’s world of early nineteenth-century America. . . . The aspect of the book that makes it exceptional, however, is Schwartz’s refusal to confine her history to the typical archive-based method. Intertwined with each section are bits of public history, where Schwartz gives personal accounts of trips to museum exhibits on the First Ladies. In fact, Schwartz uses these flashforwards as a literary device, framing her main historical accounts with contemporary reflections, and to great effect.”
(David Jamison, H-FedHis, H-NET REVIEWS)
“In Ties That Bound, Marie Jenkins Schwartz, who has written about children in slavery, turns to the relationships Martha Washington, Martha (Patsy) Jefferson Randolph, and Dolley Madison had with the slaves in their families. The sum of these tales conveys, with even greater power than the individual distasteful details, the ugliness and personal corruption that almost inevitably infected people who owned other people.”
(Martha Saxton, Women’s Review of Books)
“To bring some balance to the flood of books on the Founding Fathers and their political lives, Marie Jenkins Schwartz turns her lens on the wives of the Virginia presidents: Martha Washington, Martha Jefferson (who complicated her narrative because she died so young that her daughter stepped in as surrogate first lady for several months), and Dolley Madison — women who were born into slaveholding families and married slaveholding men.
Ties That Bound, the resulting well-researched history of the relationships that developed between these first ladies and their slaves, makes for compelling reading.”
(Vivian Bruce Conger, Washington Independent Review of Books)
“Marie Jenkins Schwartz brings to life the everyday realities of the society from which the United States emerged—especially the lives of women, children, and slaves. Morally passionate, rich in humanity, this is essential reading for anyone who genuinely seeks to understand the history of our nation.”
(Christianity Today)
“In this new study, the author examines the relationship between white women and enslaved African Americans in the households of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. Her thorough and sensitive analysis of life at Mount Vernon, Monticello, and Montpelier—as well as the presidential residences in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington—reveals the complex gender, race, and class systems that underlay life in early America.”
(Katherine Jellison, Historian)
“Much of the literature about early First Ladies emphasizes their roles as helpmates, hostesses, and heroines in behalf of their country and their husbands’ political career. Schwartz refines our understanding of their roles by illuminating how slaves facilitated their mistresses’ success. . . . One of the strengths of Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves is that the first families’ slaves emerge as discrete individuals with stories of their own.”
(Sarah Brooks Sundberg, Journal of Southern History)
“Schwartz shows how deeply slavery was embedded in the Founders’ households and explores in exquisite detail the fraught relationships between these Patriot mistresses and the men and women and adults and children whose labor they commanded. A lively and insightful book that complements—and at times contradicts—works glorifying the Founding Fathers and their wives and (white) daughters.”
(Jacqueline Jones, author of A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America)
Praise for Birthing a Slave
“This remarkably researched and thorough book on pregnancy and childbirth among enslaved African-Americans demonstrates how the most personal and intimate aspects of slaves' lives were fraught with politics and power. Schwartz, whose previous work Born in Bondage explored the lives of children under slavery, draws upon medical records, journals, letters, and WPA interviews to recreate a slave's progression from conception to birth. Her access into this intimate world is stunning, and she provides rich, challenging accounts. She contends that planters and doctors used "biological science and learning to uphold power relations in the South," and indicts doctors for their complicity in white brutality on black women's bodies. In turn, black women used resistance tactics that ranged from birth control to midwifery in a struggle for control over their bodies and children...The narratives Schwartz weaves create a vivid, highly detailed portrait of women's lives under slavery, in turns that are both chilling (the casual brutality of slave-owners) and awe-inspiring (the strength and bravery of the enslaved).” (Publishers Weekly)
“Birthing a Slave is exhaustively researched, engagingly written, and persuasively argued, and it skillfully blends social and medical history. The volume is a major contribution to the literature of slavery, and it will have a wide appeal and enrich the work of a variety of scholars, especially those interested in the South and slavery, health and medicine, and women.” (James O. Breeden, Journal of American History)
“As Schwartz convincingly demonstrates, the history of reproductive health touches upon nearly every debate that has dominated slavery studies over the past seven decades: resistance and agency, hegemony, paternalism, family, culture, and religion. For its historiographical reach, analytical breadth, and archival depth, Birthing a Slave will be of great interest to scholars of African American history, southern history, women's history, and the history of medicine. This book is impeccably researched and beautifully written. Schwartz has admirably tackled a sensitive subject with analytical grace and narrative skill. While it may not be the right book to savor over a morning coffee, Birthing a Slave is social history at its finest.” (Hilary Moss, Common-Place)
“Outstanding primary source research supports Schwartz's fine work. Moreover, the book's creative organizational scheme traces the physical territory that medical practitioners and slaveowners tried to possess by separating the book into the bodily concerns that slave women faced over the course of their reproductive lives. Schwartz's first-rate narrative, her exceptional primary source investigations, and unique format make Birthing a Slave an excellent contribution not only to the history of medicine but also to the history of American slavery...Schwartz's text is likely to become a classic in the history of slavery and medicine. Specialists in the history of slavery, medicine, or gender will surely appreciate it. Finally, it would be a welcome addition to a course dedicated to the history of medicine, the history of women in medicine, or gender history. (Karol Kovalovich Weaver, Georgia Historical Quarterly)
“This is a good book, well researched, and filled with useful information.” (John S. Haller, American Historical Review)
“This study adds much to our understanding of obstetrical and gynecological practices on slave women and the complexities and impersonality of the master-slave relationship.” (Steven Case, North Carolina Historical Review)
“A fascinating history of reproductive medicine in the antebellum southern slave system when black women struggled to control pregnancy and childbirth on their own terms. Schwartz clearly and convincingly reveals the role of laboring black women--both as workers and as reproducers of the enslaved work force--as central to the American slave system.” (Jacqueline Jones, author of A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America)
“Birthing a Slave gives us a ground-level view of medicine, gender, and doctor-patient relationships under the slave system in the U.S. South. Deeply researched and engagingly written, Schwartz's book is sure to become not only an essential work in our understanding of health care in the antebellum South, but also of the wider society that framed the values defining health and sickness.” (Steven M. Stowe, author of Doctoring the South: Southern Physicians and Everyday Medicine in the Mid-Nineteenth Century)
“Compellingly argued and beautifully written, this book is a major contribution to women's history, the study of slavery, and the history of gynecology and obstetrics. Rich and remarkably well-researched, Birthing a Slave shows how struggles over reproduction, sexuality, and mothering are central to an understanding of slavery.” (Steven Mintz, author of Huck’s Raft)
“Schwartz puts slave births in the medical and social context of the times while looking at childbearing through the eyes of physicians, slaveowners, overseers, and bondwomen. This ‘slavery and obstetrics' book will be a valuable and most readable resource for scholars and students.” (Todd L. Savitt, author of Medicine and Slavery)
“An impressive blend of medical and social history exposing the vested interests of southern slave society in the reproductive health of African American bondwomen. Schwartz's meticulous research illuminates health issues--such as cancer, infertility, and menstruation--that have received little to no attention elsewhere in scholarship on medicine and slavery.” (Sharla Fett, author of Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations)
Praise for Born in Bondage
“By 1860, the U.S. contained four million slaves. Half of them were under 15 years of age. While material for this research is difficult to come by, Schwartz attempts to chronicle the childhood of these enslaved youngsters. Working from the WPA slave narratives of the thirties, slave memoirs and autobiographical works, plantation records, and, notably, the research of George Rawick, Schwartz organizes her material by developmental stages from the treatment of the pregnant mother through the birth, infancy, childhood, adolescence and finally marriage of the young slave. . . . Most interesting, perhaps, is the dilemma faced by the young slave caught between the rules and expectations of the master and those of the slave community. The parents, too, are caught, as they attempt to retain some control over the lives of their children within a system that would allow them little or no such control. . . . Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults.” (Patricia A. Moore, KLIATT)
“In her first book, Schwartz looks deeply into the everyday ways masters and slave parents negotiated for 'control' over slave children . . . . With a sophisticated reading of the WPA slave narratives, she reconstructs the experiences of slaves in Virginia, South Carolina, and Alabama, from birth, becoming "educated" to the world around them, reaching sexual maturity, and learning to work. . . . In her very readable book, Schwartz finds the masters' paternalism less generous than slaveholders boasted and more complicated than historians surmise today. An important addition to scholarship.” (Randall M. Miller, Library Journal)
“A significant study of the hardships of raising children in antebellum slavery. . . . The fluid writing is enlivened by oral histories, chapter notes, and striking photos. Essential reading for all who want to understand the complex and long-lasting forces pulling at America's antebellum slaves”. (Kirkus Reviews)
“Schwartz makes the original and useful point that there was an inherent conflict between paternalism...and the efforts of slaves to maintain a family life of their own. To the degree that masters took direct responsibility for slave children they undermined the authority of the parents and the unity of the slave family.” (George M. Fredrickson, New York Review of Books)
“Historian Schwartz focuses on the parent-child bond in this nuanced study of the pressures that slavery placed on the families and how parents and children responded.” (Mary Carroll, Booklist)
“In Born in Bondage, Marie Jenkins Schwartz uses WPA slave narratives as well as diaries, letters, and account books left by slave holders to compare and contrast parents' and slaveowners' expectations, hopes, and meanings attached to a child born in slavery. Masters and parents both hoped to impart to the children their own beliefs about slavery, self-esteem, and the southern social system. Tracing the stages of a slave child's life from conception and birth to courtship and marriage, this book details the way that decisions were made about raising enslaved children and the way slave children learned to perceive their own lives.” (Angela Boswell, H-Net Reviews)
“Marie Jenkins Schwartz provides a masterful analysis…as she traces slaves' experiences from infancy and childhood through adolescence and into parenthood. In doing so, she adds to our understanding of the subtle power plays involved in plantation life and the extent to which children often become pawns in ongoing struggles over authority and identity...Schwartz's most original contribution lies in framing her findings in the arch of life stages from birth to adulthood.” (John C. Inscoe, Journal of the Early Republic)
“Relying primarily on the narratives with former slaves conducted under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, Schwartz focuses her attention on slaves in Virginia, along the rice coast of South Carolina and Georgia, and in Alabama. The result is a carefully constructed monograph that manages to offer new insights about familiar subjects...Her attention to the life cycle of slave children and families offers a fresh take on these familiar arguments, helping to strengthen them and to reaffirm the impressive accomplishment of slaves' survival.” (Marli F. Weiner, Georgia Historical Quarterly)
“She is particularly insightful at describing 19th-century African American child-rearing practices and the relationships between slave children and their parents…Schwartz makes several major contributions to scholarly understanding of the history of antebellum slavery, the slave family, and childhood.” (E. W. Carp, Choice)