Jennifer Morgan's work is thick and dense. It is the study of African women enslaved in the early english colonies and the impact of slavery on their lives and their (women's) impact on the development of slavery. Morgan explores the ways that enslaved women lived their lives on the side of slaveowner's visions of themselves as successful White men and shouldered burdens connected but distinct by enslaved men.

This book was tough to get through. Each chapter required a lot of work to read. One of the points I liked from the book is the idea that ravel narratives were used to create race and racial slavery. These porno-tropical writings were used exploit Black women into culturally inferior beings.

Labouring Women rejects isolated categories of identity in an effort to inch to an unstable vision of the past and of the present. She is building on older ideas that demand scholars pay attention to space and time in US Slavery. This book is older; it shows. Morgan does great work but it's a heavy read.