One of the first things that should be said in order to unpack a book about the horrors and evils of American slavery is this: American slavery was an abomination predicated on hateful assumptions about other humans based only on skin color. To reduce Laboring Women to its historical factualness without acknowledging that the effects of slavery are still in the present would be to miss entirely what Morgan is indicating about the women. There are still effects from the mistreatment of slaves in America, which means that there are still effects of the specific mistreatment against women. Therefore the book could be understood through the lens of intersectionality, when a person struggles under the combination of different types of social oppressions.
For instance, men don't give birth, so childbirth is a unique struggle in slave communities to the women. In slave communities, women understand the tragedy of unwanted pregnancies (often from rape) and the pains of childbirth, just to have the child stolen and mistreated, or even sold away. This creates a problem in slave communities, because women all have an extra layer of trauma in common that drives them to create a sometimes insular community.
Importantly, the combination of their suffering is wrong on both accounts: There were assumptions about women's health and about women themselves, such as the idea that women could both be mothers and workers, and that women's bonds to their children are not valuable in slave communities. Then there is the overarching assumption about race that allowed white men to feel justified in their blatant mistreatment of slaves.
These issues are important in understanding race reconciliation, especially in America where the institution of racism created a great empire in which we still exist. It's more than just a blemish in the country's past, because the effects of slavery still extend into the present.
