white women’s bodies in order to determine whether they were concocting reasons not to nurse, especially those of the elite and planter classes. Physicians, husbands, and other men had to take women at their word and allow them to make maternal decisions for themselves.82 White women separated enslaved mothers from their children and placed their own infants at the breasts of these women. They compelled enslaved women to suckle their white children shortly after these mothers had lost their own. They denied enslaved women the right to publicly express their grief. In short, they perpetrated
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