Although there are differences en masse between men and women, Morgan shows that ultimately it was assumptions about gender differences that dictated the treatment of African slaves in the Americas. It was also driven by the need for slave owners to simultaneously extort as much work from their slave women as they could while still ensuring that the mothers would conceive children, which under United States laws would legally be the property of whoever owned the slave woman who delivered the child.
These differences between the treatment of women, continues Morgan, ultimately drive the slave communities into two camps: the men have their experience of slavery, and the women have their own identity, given that their labor types are often slightly different (or even noticeably different), and also given that women shared traumatic experiences as mothers, often losing their children in the slave economy, and often being the victims of an abuse that differed from the abuse that men sustained.
She then tells the story of a typical woman from West Africa, kidnapped and forced through the Middle Passage into a life as a slave on American plantations. The woman's experience of motherhood reshapes her perception of her plight as a slave, and in a community of women who share her traumatic experiences, she becomes quickly engrained in a support system of women who know exactly what she's going through.
