Read the passage below from a historical analysis of gender and slavery:
'On nineteenth-century Southern plantations, the female slave network functioned as a distinct cooperative unit. Bound together by gendered labor assignments like spinning, weaving, and sewing, as well as shared responsibilities for childcare and healthcare, enslaved women formed a community within a community. This network also operated as a system of covert resistance. Women cooperated to protect one another from physical abuse, shared herbal knowledge to treat illnesses or secretly manage reproduction, and controlled the flow of information on the plantation, creating an informal communication network that shielded their activities from white surveillance.'
Which of the following historical conclusions is best supported by the passage?
- AIt demonstrates that the primary objective of these collaborative female networks was to organize grand maroonage and build permanent independent communities.
- BIt suggests that because women were generally excluded from planning armed rebellions, their networks did not constitute meaningful political resistance.
- It highlights how gendered labor conditions and reproductive networks allowed enslaved women to form community-based systems of daily survival and covert resistance.Answer
- DIt shows that reproductive resistance was designed as a direct legal challenge to the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem in colonial and state courts.