Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0393314812
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"This is one of those rare books that quickly became the standard work in its field. Professor White has done justice to the complexity of her subject."―Anne Firor Scott, Duke University
Living with the dual burdens of racism and sexism, slave women in the plantation South assumed roles within the family and community that contrasted sharply with traditional female roles in the larger American society. This new edition of Ar'n't I a Woman? reviews and updates the scholarship on slave women and the slave family, exploring new ways of understanding the intersection of race and gender and comparing the myths that stereotyped female slaves with the realities of their lives. Above all, this groundbreaking study shows us how black women experienced freedom in the Reconstruction South ― their heroic struggle to gain their rights, hold their families together, resist economic and sexual oppression, and maintain their sense of womanhood against all odds.
members of my dissertation committee, particularly Daniel Scott Smith and Marilyn Miller. Several of my colleagues in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee read and commented on the dissertation and first drafts of the book manuscript. I thank Margo Conk, Reginald Horseman, and Carole Shammas for the time and the effort they put into it. Special thanks are extended to Margo Conk, who for six years never stopped pushing me to finish this work and who was always so
attempts came to naught but Bibb later met and successfully courted Malinda, the woman he was married to while a slave.6 In situations where men outnumbered women there was fierce competition for female companionship. No man wanted to be edged out by another but sometimes the courtship ritual demanded abilities some men did not command. A case in point involved Sam, an antebellum Louisiana slave, and a woman, Miss Lively, for whom Sam had an ardent passion. At a Christmas party Sam attempted to
of black men.64 Historian Elsa Barkley Brown has argued that such malecenteredness has led to the assumption that black women were violated less often and therefore were less threatening to whites than black men. This focus on men led naturally to an emphasis on lynching as the major form of racial violence and limited attention to black women who were lynched (at least fifteen between 1889 and 1898; at least seventy-six between 1882 and 1927).65 Brown might have added that rape has very often
living doing what they did best; conversely, it kept them in a never-ending cycle of debt to landowners and merchants who had advanced food, supplies, and equipment for a share of the family’s meager crop. Since interest rates were usuriously high, and since neither landowners nor merchants had any interest in making black tenants independent, year after year black people worked for landowners without making a profit from their share of the crop. According to historian Sharon Ann Holt, household
Zelnick, Melvin. “Fertility of the American Negro in 1830-1850.” Population Studies (1966), 20:77-83. Index abolitionism, 13-14, 15, 36, 38, 44, 45, 46 abortion, 84-85, 126 Abraham (slave), 145 “abroad” marriages, 76, 104, 132, 153-55 African-American studies: black women’s history in, 3-12 male-centeredness of, 176-77 Alexander, Lucretia, 134 Allen, Jack, 187 Allston, Adele Petigru, 117, 134 Allston plantation (South Carolina), 134, 172 Amaritta (slave), 138 amenorrhea, 83