Dr. Erin Shearer, 'Enslaved Women, Infanticide, and a Feminist History of Harm: A New Direction in Slavery Studies'

N.B.: This episode describes sexual violence and graphic bodily harm.

(With sincere apologies for the re-upload due to a technical issue.)

“We’re still, as a society, so apprehensive about ascribing to women a nature of violence. When we do, we often use pathological discourses as a way of explaining why these women would be exceptions to the rule.”

Our guest, Dr Erin Shearer, is a Fellow in Residence at the Rothermere American Institute (University of Oxford), Associate Lecturer in History and Postgraduate Visiting Fellow (University of Reading), and Associate Tutor (University of Warwick).

The paper ‘Enslaved Women, Infanticide, and a Feminist History of Harm: A New Direction in Slavery Studies’ emerges from Shearer's current monograph, which asks:

How and why did enslaved women in the antebellum US South use violence as a form of resistance?

Challenging long-standing historiography, Dr Erin Shearer finds that deliberate, retributive acts of violence were not the preserve of enslaved men, but a shared and interchangeable phenomenon.

This paper intervenes in a largely unexplored area of scholarship by examining enslaved women’s acts of harm and infanticide against the white planter-class children of their enslavers.

Using new methodological approaches to slavery's archive, and applying an intersectional Feminist History of Harm, Dr Shearer sheds critical light on the inner lives and motivations that inform why women facilitated acts of violence within, and against, slavery's coercive regime.

This episode explores what it means to take women’s violence seriously—and why doing so alters how we understand lived experiences of slavery, resistance, and historical method.

“It’s important that we give women the same complexity that we’ve given men, and that we look at women as multifaceted beings…the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

This episode was recorded in Michaelmas term on 20 October 2025.

See Dr Shearer's recent article:

Shearer, “Challenging the Overseer: Enslaved Women’s Violent Resistance in the US Antebellum South.” (ANCH, 2025)

And related episodes:

Prof. Emily West, 'Enslaved Women and the Duality of Feeding in the Antebellum South'

Prof. Sophie White, 'His Master's Grace": Extra-Judicial Violence in Atlantic Slave Societies'

Hosted this week by:

Daisy Semmler, MPhil (2025), Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge

Daisy researches how enslaved and free Black communities learned to read and write during the anti-literacy period in the continental United States (c.1740–1865).

Timestamped References

04:55

⁠Library of Congress – WPA Slave Narratives ⁠

11:00

King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (2nd ed. 2011)

10:56

Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (2020)

18:19

⁠ Nunley, “Thrice Condemned: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Practice of Leniency in Antebellum Virginia Courts ” (JSH, 2021)⁠

Nunley, The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia (2023)

Taylor, Brooding Over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance (2023)

22:37

Johnson, “On Agency” (JSH, 2003)and “Agency: A Ghost Story” in Foner & Johnson, Slavery's Ghost: The Problem of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation (2011)

23:14

Maglaque, “Reproductive Unfreedom and Structural Violence in Early Modern Catholic Europe” (JEMH, 2025)

26:39

West & Shearer, “Fertility Control, Shared Nurturing, and Dual Exploitation: The Lives of Enslaved Mothers in the Antebellum United States” (WHR, 2018)

⁠Knight, “Mothering and Labour in the Slaveholding Households of the Antebellum American South” (P&P, 2020)⁠

28:08

Hall, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (2021)