More than Chains and Toil. A Christian Work Ethic of Enslaved Women by Joan M. MartinReview by: ANDY JOSEPHCaribbean Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 1 (March 2001), pp. 89-90Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654219 .

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More than Chains and toil. A Christian Work Ethic of Enslaved Women by Joan M. Martin Louisville: Westminister John Knox Press, 2000.190 PP. $24.95.

Work is intrinsic to any society, but in the nascent American republic African American bodies and work were owned by white people.

Although there are a number of texts which deal with women's work during slavery never before has it been analyzed within the framework of Christian social ethics. It is this task that the Rev. Dr. Joan Martin, Associate Professor of Christian Social Ethics at Episcopal Divinity School Cambridge, Massachusetts in More than Chains and toil. A Christian Work Ethic of Enslaved Women sets out to accomplish in by relating] the experiential realities in lives of enslaved women and their social world in the ante-bellum concerning the relationship between moral agency, work, and human meaning (Martin 4).

More than Chains and Toil, is divided into five chapters that intersect the disciplines of history, sociology, African American studies, Christian ethics, theol- ogy and even semiotics. The first chapter presents an overview of slave narratives during chattel slavery, during Reconstruction, and those resulting from the work of the WPA Project.

Martin discusses the multifarious deployment of slave narratives, claiming these texts were a means of writing African women into history, as well as a means of articulating a strategy of resistance within chattel slavery. According to Martin, slave narratives should

be seen as sacred texts, that is, texts that enable one to see the processes whereby religious faith becomes a source of Power for African-Americans as an Oppressed people (Martin 22).

Chapter Two lays the theoretical foundation for Martin's project - the womanist intellectual tradition, supplemented by Pierre Bourdieu's, logic of prac- tice" with its concept of social space as multidimensional, relational and interactive. In addition to Bourdieu's work, Martin also utilizes Jame's C. Scott's theory of 'hidden transcripts because "Bourdieu inadequately addresses the power of subor- dinated groups to resist and subvert the dominant objective structures even if they must do so in ways that appear passive, ineffective, and short term" (Martin 69). The importance of Scott for Martin's reading Of women's slave narratives is the currency his theory gives the often neglected social spaces and actions wherein the Oppressed experience relative autonomy within their structured livelihood.

An outline and detailed analysis of the four constitutive elements for constructing a work ethic based on the slave narratives are the focus of chapter Three. These elements are:

• Blackwomen's theological and ethical understanding of the relation of God to slavery;

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• Womanish moral authority, instruction and action as an inter-generational dy- namic for communal maintenance, empowerment, and solidarity in the con- text of Oppression;

• Black-women's struggles for self-determination in the use of one's own sex- ual and reproduction labour, and

• Blackwomen's work-related attitudes of self-reliance, and confidence in one's own learned craft and skill.(Martin 80)

Martin engages in meticulous discussion of these four elements in the slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Kleckley, and Sojoumer Truth (among others) and highlights their articulation of the four theses listed above. By the end of the chapter, the reader recognizes that indeed there is a fundamentally dynamic attitude towards work in the narratives of enslaved black women; work as exploita- tion is considered evil, but work that functions as resistance strategy engenders "moral living."

In chapter Four of More Than Chains and Toil, Martin analyzes and

critiques the notions of work as "calling" and as "vocation" in the theologies of Martin Luther and John Calvin, respectively. Her engagement with these theologi- ans is necessary because Protestant notions are tremendously influenced by these two theologians, especially the notion of a Protestant work ethic, which has deep affiliations with Calvin's Geneva and engendered modern capitalism as per Max Weber. Because none of these theologies takes the idea of exploitative work into consideration in the construction of its theology, Martin attempts to open the discourse to include both a critique of exploitative work and a redefinition of work.

More Than Chains and Toil ends with a discussion of contemporary discourse on work. Notable facts are the decline in unionized work, federal

government workfare programmes, the flight of work to Third world countries, and the more problematic issues of work administered through the prison labour

system, where unprecedented numbers of incarcerated African -American males

(over 800,000) perform work unrewarded by the multinationals who contract prison workers. The multidisciplinary method which More than Chains and Toil employs, its dialogue with and critique of modem Protestant theology and ethics, deserves distinction in the field of womanist theo-ethics. But what sets Dr. Martins work

apart from other studies of womens work during slavery is her groundbreaking discussion of slave narratives within the framework of Christian social ethics. The texts focus on the relationship between moral agency, work, and human meaning" opens slave narratives to new ways of reading that enable contemporary readers to discover their value as both sacred and literary testimonies of endurance and resistance.

ANDY JOSEPH

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