The Peacock Flower and Reproductive Resistance Under Slavery

JSTOR Daily traces the history of the peacock flower, a vivid Caribbean shrub prized by European botanists as an ornamental plant, while the knowledge enslaved women held about it as an abortifacient was largely left out of European science. Drawing on historian Londa Schiebinger's research, the piece describes women across Suriname, Jamaica, Saint-Domingue, and Barbados using the plant to end pregnancies or induce menstruation, often as a deliberate refusal to bear children into slavery. German naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian recorded testimony from enslaved women in Suriname who told her plainly why they used it, yet that knowledge never entered European medical tradition. As the outlet notes, other naturalists who witnessed the same practice dismissed or condemned it instead, a pattern Schiebinger reads as evidence of what colonial science chose to preserve and what it chose to ignore.

Listen to this story

Hear this and more stories in a personalized audio briefing.

Open The Chonkerton