For women’s and gender historians, the history of private life and domesticity has long been a foundational site of revisionist history.

The emergence of the public/private divide as a crucial matter of state and juridical power, and challenges to that divide as a crucial matter of feminist activism is a story well told.

Drawing on research for her forthcoming Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2021), Prof. Jennifer L. Morgan revisits this terrain from the perspective of early modern slavery in the English Atlantic arguing that our understanding of privacy and domesticity owes a great deal to the ideological and material position of enslaved African women in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

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Header Image: The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, honouring thousands of people lynched in America’s South. Photo credit: AP/Brynn Anderson