"[H]aving deducted $12 from her hire on act. of pregnancy": Enslaved Women, Reproduction, and Hiring Valuation in Albemarle County, Virginia, 1787-1865

In considering the valuation of enslaved women, we must engage with both the domestic slave trade and the hiring market. Interrogating the secondary market of slave hiring allows for a fuller understanding of how valuation was a gendered process. Hirers did not value enslaved fecundity in the same way as enslavers did in the slave trade. Women who were pregnant or childrearing often saw a decrease in their value on the hiring market. Stakes were lower as hirers only rented enslaved labor for a year at a time; they had no need to concern themselves with enslaved women’s fertility. Enslaved pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing was a burden to hirers who sought the maximum amount of labor in a single year period. If the stipulations of their hiring contract were not met because of enslaved motherhood, enslavers often took on the duty of reimbursing hirers for lost labor. Interrogating hirers’ lack of financial interest in enslaved fecundity shifts the way that historians have thought about the valuation of enslaved reproduction.