Enslaved Women in the Antebellum South

I. Gender and slaves’ lives

  • Slavery in some ways overshadowed or trumped gender distinctions
    • Both men and women lacked legal rights
    • Both were viewed by masters as productive workers (“hands”)
    • Both vulnerable to brutal punishment and the auction block
    • Both prohibited from aspiring to the dominant culture’s gender ideals

II. But gender still mattered

  • Affected how masters treated slaves
    • How they apportioned labor tasks
    • Women were valued for their reproductive capacities
    • More often subjected to sexual abuse
    • Systematic attempts to deny slaves’ manhood
  • Within the slave quarters
    • How slaves defined their familial roles
    • Emphasis on men as providers; women as nurturers
  • Slavery also influenced roles and ideals within white society
    • Relieved elite white women of labor in South
    • Raw materials that fueled cotton mills in the North

III. Slavery in the 19th century

  • Slave trade outlawed in 1807
  • In the 1820s, slavery became more entrenched
  • Introduction of cotton; territorial expansion
  • Rise of a distinctive African-American culture–syncretic blend of African and European traditions
  • Became more paternalistic
    • Defense of slavery as a form of benevolence (!)
    • Response to abolitionist critiques
    • Plantation mistresses assume the role of ministering to ill slaves; teaching them about Christianity, etc
    • Better material conditions, but less autonomy
  • Rise of scientific racism

 IV. On eve of the Civil War

  • But large plantations were on the rise
    • By the 1830s, most slaves lived on plantations with at least 20 slaves
    • 25% lived on plantations with 50 or more slaves
  • Slaveholding not limited to the elite
    • 3/4 of all slaveholders owned fewer than 15 slaves
    • Yeoman farmers would often first buy a female slave
  • Approximately 156,000 free blacks in the North
  • 4 million slaves
    • Blacks almost 40% of the South’s population
    • Approximately 200,000 free blacks in the South

V. Slave children

  • Issued the same clothing
    • 2 long shirts
    • Boys received pants when first sent to the fields; usually not until 10-12
  • Not given shoes until sent to fields
  • Girls age 6-12 often worked in the big house
  • Minding younger children

VI. Slave Women as Workers

  • Most slaves worked in the fields
    • In the mid-19th century, probably 7 out of 8 slaves, male and female, were agricultural workers
  • Often recorded in ledger books as a “3/4ths hand”
  • Sometimes worked together in family units; more frequently in sex-segregated “gangs”
  • Field work differed according to region and crop
    • Tobacco
    • Rice
    • Cotton
    • Sugar

VII. House slaves

  • Probably no more than 5%
    • Served as intermediaries between the slave cabins and the Big House; pilfering
  • In some ways better than fieldwork
    • House work physically easier
    • Better living conditions; health care
    • Might learn to read
  • In some ways worse
    • On-call 24 hours a day
    • Lacked social support
    • More vulnerable to abuse

VIII. “Fancy girls”

  • Some girls and young women were sold as “fancy girls,” as mistresses or sexual “companions”
  • Almost always mixed-race; some very light-skinned
  • As one ex-slave wrote:

“If God has bestowed beauty upon a slave woman, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave.”

IX. Work in the slave quarters

  • Women expected to perform household tasks
  • Cooking, washing, sewing, making soap and candles, etc.
  • Some masters allowed women to leave fields early
  • Division of labor enforced by masters
  • Forcing male slaves to do “women’s work” as a form of punishment
  • But also accepted by slaves

X. Slave families

  • Precarious; no legal protections
  • Misconception that slave families were “matriarchal”
  • Because birth records on many plantations did not record the father’s name
  • Principal of partus sequitur ventrem – the notion that the child’s condition/status follows that of the mother
  • But fathers’ names were often recorded in family Bibles as heads of households

XI. Motherhood under slavery

  • Slavery collapsed the distinction between productive and reproductive labor
    • “Productive” labor: labor that produces goods or services
    • “Reproductive” labor: labor that sustains a labor force
  • Treatment of pregnant and nursing women marginally improved post-1830
  • Motherhood as contested terrain
    • Slaves owners needed women to mother; but feared powerful “mother love”
      • Attempted to racialize the ideology of moral motherhood
    • While abolitionists’ used the same ideology to discredit slavery

XII. Motherhood in the slave community

  • No concept of illegitimacy
  • Children highly valued
    • But also a source of suffering
      • Very high infant mortality rates; twice that of whites
    • Some women resorted to abortion
    • Even infanticide
      • Case of Margaret Garner
  • Childcare and discipline
    • Childcare a collective responsibility

XIII. J. Marion Sims

  • One of the founders of modern gynecology
  • 1845-49: Performed multiple operations on three slave women suffering vesico-vaginal fistula; no anesthesia
  • Obscured his “experiments” on slave women when he published in medical journals

 After Emancipation

  • Horrendous conditions in the slave refugee camps
    • Nearly 1 million deaths among freed people
  • Women and children often most vulnerable
  • Quest for family unification
    • Difficulties in finding people; advertisements
  • Rush to legal marriages
  • Women often withdrawn from fields