Slavery

Scholarship on the lives of enslaved Black women in the United States and the Caribbean emphasizes the multidimensionality of their roles in two polarized spheres, the dynamic slave community and the plantation economy. Studies of slavery are cogent to discussions of gender because they help to problematize the historiography of women and highlight the effects of enterprise on gender identities. A historical examination of Black women under the regime of slavery points to the disunity and incoherence of feminine identity. Slavery set a social precedent by the ways in which Black women occupied at once gender-less and engendered spaces as workers and reproducers of labor. Foremost, enslaved women were defined as labor units and, indeed, slavery transformed gender relations, ironically testifying to the equality of men and women.

BONDWOMEN AND WORK

The accumulationist drive of slavery created a binary gender order, one that lauded the virtues of white femininity and the other that defeminized Black women, measuring their worth in terms of their functionality as laborers and as conduits for reproduction. Black women were unequivocally central to slave economies and any understanding of this history requires a triangular analysis of race, gender, and labor extraction as interlinking points of oppression. Moreover, histories that center Black women show that Black women's expressions of dissidence during slavery were ubiquitous and vital to the survival of enslaved communities.

The labor requirements of plantation slavery shifted gender representations and constructed Black women primarily as property with productive value. Enslaved women worked as domestics, artisans, farmers, and petty traders. They dominated the ranks of the household labor economy as well as the labor pool of field gangs. Thrust into the brutality of chattel slavery, Black women were recognized as a "versatile and flexible form of capital" (Beckles 1989, p. 3). Slave owners differentiated between skilled and unskilled labor and established hierarchical categories of household occupations, such as housekeepers and domestics. This occupational ladder awarded greater autonomy to some Black women and increased the vulnerability of others to sexual and physical abuse. Slave women served as seamstresses, cooks, and washerwomen, while also being held responsible for the suckling or nursing and weaning white children.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese argues the importance of the plantation household as an "indispensable unit of analysis because it operated as a site of production and reproduction" (1988, p. 85). Within the slaveholder's household, relations between white women and Black women were framed by the objective position of white women as "economic actors" (Fox-Genovese 1988, p. 43; Beckles 2001, p. 220). Field women comprised the majority of the plantation workforce because "gender mattered little in the production of raw commodities in New World Slavery" (Morrisey 1989, p. 31). Black bondwomen in the Caribbean weeded, hoed soil, and planted and cut sugarcane, whereas in the Carolinas and Georgia, they were the principal cultivators of rice. Yet, as historian Marietta Morrisey explains, in spite of the perceived "interchangeability of male and female slaves to slaveholders," some measure of gender stratification characterized the labor organization of plantation slavery in the Caribbean (Morrisey 1989, p. 79).

Despite dehumanizing working conditions, Black women struggled to carve out spaces for "quasi-autonomous economic activities" (Wood 1995). In the Caribbean they cultivated "gardens" and in the American South they grew "patches" for household consumption and for petty commerce. These "hucksters," "market women," and vendors were central to the informal economies found among slave populations (Beckles 1989). Southern bondwomen farmed corn, peanuts, tobacco, melons, pumpkins, beans, cabbage and benne (sesame seed) and kept poultry. Furthermore, they produced household goods such as utensils and other commodities for sale. Highly visible in the markets of South Carolina, slave women contributed to the robust informal economy of the slave community. These patterns of autonomous economic initiatives were some of the survival strategies enslaved Black women employed for the reproduction of their households during slavery.

A comradeship formed between Black women and men because of the "all hands" labor policy that joined both sexes in fieldwork (Wood 1995). Betty Wood (1995) argues that in the Southeast, a sexual division of labor was most commonly a feature of semiurban or urban centers where the majority of slave women were domestics, but that the comradeship between bondmen and bondwomen was also identifiable within the slave-based informal economies. In the Caribbean slave women cultivated food for their families and were essential to the internal slave economy as producers and sellers. Despite the visible egalitarianism surrounding productive activities between Black men and women, it did not diminish the impact of gender ideologies imposed by white patriarchy.

Rationalizations in support of hegemonic masculinity strengthened under slavery, and Black women were forced to navigate multilayered systems of gender oppression. On the sugar plantations of Barbados, Black women were the "primary source of labor reproduction" (Beckles 1989, p. 2). As "breeding women" or "breeding wenches," enslaved women were the focus of slave management, and their fertility was a calculated variable to capitalization (Beckles 1989, p. 92). Therefore, slavery was a gendered experience that included an expressed "woman's policy" that illustrated just how fundamentally Black women were at "the base of the system" (Beckles 1989, p. 29). Black female bodies were under constant surveillance, sequestered within a "geography of containment" (Camp 2004, p. 28). Black maternity was pivotal to slavery, and mixed-raced children were evidence of the systematic interference of Black women's sexuality by white men.

Enslaved Black women suffered an enormity of gynecological ailments, and miscarriages were common. Intent on exerting some biological autonomy, enslaved women used infusions of herbs to induce abortion and regulate their fertility. Even as some Black women practiced "gynecological resistance," Black motherhood could not be disentangled from slavery's profit margin (Beckles 1989, p. 158). Slave women did not acquiesce to their subordination as sexual units of production but used family life as a space for multifarious resistance. The endemic sexual abuse of female slaves was often camouflaged by the projection of hypersexuality onto Black women and a deviant sexuality onto Black men.

DYNAMIC KINSHIP AND RESISTANCE

Black female slaves struggled within a "context of duality," where multiple households depended on their labor (Bush 1990, p. 8). Early studies emphasized the matrifocality of slave families, but later scholars found that there was diversity in family arrangements within slave communities. In the United States Black family life during postemancipation was often identified as dysfunctional, damaged by a "culture of poverty" and headed by matriarchal women with peripheral Black men. Instead, traditional "conjugal domestic units" were more the norm than the exception under slavery (Morissey 1991, p. 274). Various forms of coresidential kinship, extended families, fictive kin, and mother-child units characterized Black families. Slaves practiced monogamy, polygamy, and serial monogamy within single and multigenerational households. Conjugal relationships were "unable to conform to dominant ideological patterns," as Black women were excluded from gender norms (Davis 1981, p. 12). In her assessment Angela Y. Davis contended that the oppressive practices of slavery constituted a "negative equality," which in turn helped to develop egalitarianism between Black men and women (Davis 1981, p. 18). Clearly, Black women were advocates for their families and committed to "subversive community work" (Jones 1985, p. 8). Any discussion of slave family forms has to be contextualized with reference to the forces of class, race, and gender dynamics as well as Black women's tactics for family survival.

Black women waged, to varying degrees, an everyday subaltern resistance. Strong women were targeted as potential insurgents and provocateurs. Black women led work stoppages, appropriated goods and food, engaged in infrastructural sabotage, performed self-induced abortions, and participated in marronage, armed resistance, cultural resistance, and knowledge attainment including clandestine literacy. They were not immune from physical punishment such as floggings, whippings, brandings, mutilations, hangings, or punitive rape. The institutionalization of rape was instrumental to systems of control of Black women. Consistently, the exerted agency of Black women was criminalized, and a common terrain of resistance was Black women's bodies. Bondwomen engaged in antihegemonic practices that precipitated the social and community activism undertaken by Black women following emancipation. Hilary Beckles explained that "anti-slavery mentalities preceded the plantation" and thus a counterperspective to the legitimatizing ideologies for slavery emerged among captive African women before they arrived in North America (Beckles 1998, p. 45).

Truancy, escape, and marronage were the most recognizable forms of physical resistance to the institution of slavery. Historical antislavery activists, such as Nanny from Jamaica and Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth from the United States are iconic figures of female resistance. Whereas women were "key protagonists of social and biological regeneration" within maroon communities, the high valuation of women did not preclude the formation of gender hierarchies (Steady 1981, p. 457). Enslaved women were critical to the "culture of opposition" that existed in juxtaposition to a culture of degradation (Camp 2004).

NARRATIVES AND BLACK WOMEN'S AGENCY

A review of slavery advances the discourse on gender because it disaggregates women as a category and empowers the subjectivity of Black women. Black literature commenced with the slave narrative, and these early texts extolled the power of literacy. Black women's subjectivity emerged through slave narratives, refracting resistance through orality. Slave narratives were testimonies that exposed the intimacies of injustice. DoVeanna Fulton refers to these expressions as "oral resistance" that valorizes Black female subjectivity. Narratives implicated slavery as "crystallizing Black women's experiences of oppression" and articulated a rebuttal to oppression (2006, p. 6). Autobiographical narratives authored by Black women and oral life stories point to a "Black feminist epistemology" (Hill Collins 1990). The corpus of slave narratives include Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs (writing as Linda Brent, 1861), Narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York (1850), Letters of Phyllis Wheatley, the Negro Slave Poet of Boston (1864), Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1864), and collected interviews from the Works Progress Administration. Slave testimonies contested the depersonalization experienced by women and cracked the unnatural silences forced on them. Toni Morrison, author of the novel Beloved, explains that her writing process draws on a "literary archeology" to access the interiority of Black female subjectivity. Her writing accentuates an emotional memory that is interwoven with imagination, whereby she "extends, fills in and complements slave autobiographical narratives" (Morrison 1998, p. 199). Cultural memory and emotional memory reaffirm identity and reclaim agency. These diverse "liberatory narratives" interrogated the parameters of freedom and illuminated the journey from "objectification to subjectivity" (Davis 2004, p. 305).

Black women were "quadruply burdened" by the hazards of slavery, reproduction, gender oppression, and racial oppression (Gaspar and Hine 1996, p. 210). Because slavery was "female focused," an appraisal of the productive lives of Black women is of paramount importance (Beckles 1998, Davis 1981). Slavery was a seminal process that "invented" new ethnic, cultural, political, and gender identities. American slavery set the tone for future movements where peoples of African descent fought to "define their collective identity and address the structure of hierarchy" (Mullings 1997, p. 132). Theorizing about the impact of slavery on contemporary gender relations requires that conceptual models are employed that "capture the multiple jeopardy of the interacting processes that face Black women" (King 1988, p. 47). The greater objective parity between Black men and women has been decisive in configuring family life and recasting gender ideologies.

The histories of Black women throughout the Caribbean and the United States demonstrate the "metalanguage of race" and how it shapes multiple identities discursively and ideologically (Higginbotham 1992). The experience of "simultaneous oppressions" informs a "Black women's standpoint" and draws on the distinctive histories of Black women (Hill Collins 1990). Slavery was an extreme example of the trajectory of race in relation to other systems of power. In sum, slavery as an institution was embedded with paradoxical ideologies and practices, and its importance lies in its demonstration of how gender identity cannot be extricated from relations of race, community, culture, and class.

see also Family; Gender, Theories of; Hierarchy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anim-Addo, Joan. 2004. "Sister Goose's Sisters: African Caribbean Women's Nineteenth Century Testimony." Women: A Cultural Review. 15(1): 35-56.

Beckles, Hilary McD. 1989. Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Beckles, Hilary McD. 1998. "Historicizing Slavery in West Indian Feminisms." Feminist Review 59: 34-56.

Beckles, Hilary McD. 1999. Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society. Kingston, Jamaica: M. Wiener.

Beckles, Hilary McD. 2001. "Freeing Slavery: Gender Paradigms in the Social History of Caribbean Slavery." In Slavery, Freedom and Gender: The Dynamics of Caribbean Society, ed. Brian L. Moore, B.W. Higman, Carl Campbell, and Patrick Bryan. Barbados: University of West Indies Press.

Bush, Barbara. 1990. Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650–1838. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Camp, Stephanie M. H. 2004. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Carby, Hazel. 1982. "White Women Listen: Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood." In The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain. London: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham.

Davis, Angela Y. 1981. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Vintage Books.

Davis, Amanda Y. 2004. "Review of The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery and Gender in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction." MELUS 29(2): 302-305.

Dill, Bonnie Thornton. 1979. "The Dialectics of Black Womanhood." Signs 4(3): 543-555.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. 1988. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Fulton, DoVeanna. 2006. Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women's Narrative of Slavery. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Gaspar, David Barry, and Darlene Clark Hine. 1996. More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. 1992. "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race." Signs 17(2): 251-274.

Hill Collins, Patricia. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman.

Jones, Jacqueline. 1985. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books.

King, Deborah. 1988. "Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology." Signs 14(1): 42-72.

Mitchell, Angelyn. 2002. The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Morrisey, Marietta. 1989. Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Morrisey, Marietta. 1991. "Women's Work, Family Formation, and Reproduction among Caribbean Slaves." In Caribbean Slave Society and Economy, ed. Hilary Beckles and Verene Sheperd. New York: New Press.

Morrison, Toni. 1998. "The Site of Memory." In Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Rev edition, ed. William Zinsser. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Mullings, Leith. 1986. "Uneven Development: Class, Race, and Gender in the United States before 1900." In Women's Work: Development and the Division of Labor by Gender, ed. Eleanor Leacock and Helen I. Safa. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey.

Mullings, Leith. 1997. On Our Own Terms: Race, Class, and Gender in the Lives of African-American Women. New York: Routledge.

Patterson, Tiffany Ruby. 1999. "Gender, Slavery, and the Making of New World Identities." Gender and History 11(2): 373-378.

Steady, Filomina Chioma, ed. 1981. The Black Woman Cross-Culturally. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman.

Wood, Betty. 1995. Women's Work, Men's Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Low Country Georgia. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Young, Hershini Bhana. 2005. "Inheriting the Criminalized Black Body: Race, Gender, and Slavery in Eva's Man." African American Review 39(3): 377-393.

                                                      Sayida Self