Contested Bodies. Sasha Turner
remain home because of ill health.33
There is nothing to suggest that Bess received time off due to pregnancy alone, however. Sick workers commonly received work exemption, particularly when they suffered from contagious illnesses like smallpox. Planters had firsthand knowledge that epidemics could destroy harvests and wipe out populations, both free and enslaved. When the Georgia estate suffered from an influenza outbreak, it lasted from the end of December 1809 to March 1810. The disease was so widespread that the mill ground to a halt, and despite medical aid, the property lost several workers who died shortly after contracting the illness.34 It is quite possible that Bess, also identified as “diseased,” suffered from a highly communicable disease, and quarantining her away from the general laboring population contained its spread.35 The goal of allowing pregnant and sick workers to remain home or in hospitals was nonetheless the same. Planters tried to alleviate conditions thought to undermine demographic stability while maintaining plantation productivity.
Collins’s advice to exempt pregnant women from all “kinds of labours which require extraordinary exertions” (emphasis added) had the makings of a truer pronatal reform. In his writings, he stressed that during the early stages of pregnancy women could continue working as before. They should be exempted from tasks likely to cause “external injuries,” “blows, or strains, or sudden falls to the ground,” because they could cause women to miscarry.36 These were very idealistic reforms because they required planters to track and reassign pregnant women. Few planters were willing to make such assessments. Instead, most parturient workers received concessions according to the particular labor demands of planting and harvesting. The January-to-June harvest season was the most intense labor period on the sugar plantations. For the first six months of the year, the strongest men and women harvested ripened canes by hand using curved knives (bills), tied them in bundles, and packed them on mule-drawn carts that hauled them to the mills. A second group of workers followed the cane carts from the fields to the factories, where they unloaded and piled the cane into bundles next to the mills for grinding. Gradually, mill feeders extracted juice from canes by passing them back and forth through vertical or horizontal rollers, built from wood and cast iron and spun mostly by cattle, but sometimes by wind, water, and, even more rarely, by steam.37
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