Mother Nature’s Gift to African Women a curse or a blessing?
African women played a key role during and after the slave trade ended. The connections put together between Women and Slavery Volume one: Africa, The Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic (Campbell, Miers & Miller, 2007), Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Morgan, 2004) and Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Paton & Scully, 2005), show the roles African women played and contributed during slavery. So, what were the main roles of women during the slave trade that were highlighted within these three sources?
African women played a key role in the role of the family in Africa. Instead of having a patriarchal run household, everything ran through a matriarchal tradition. However, later on this custom was challenged and taken over by patriarchal ruling of the family once the slave trade kicked and is still prevalent in many societies today. African women were also exposed to changes in marriage. Before the slave trade began, women’s parents would choose who would marry their daughters and would give their dowry to their future husband, along with expectations both he and their daughter would have to obtain. Once the slave trade hit hard, African women were sold off to the highest bidder and were sometimes allowed to find another slave to marry if the owner wished it. Other times African women were not allowed to marry at all and would still be expected to do the chores of taking care of children whether they were theirs or their masters. Women went from no choice of who they were marry, to possibly choosing or losing the opportunity to marry at all. This only would complicate the role African women played in the structure of family and domestic life.
African women were expected to work in the domestic sector and fields. Women seemed more versatile or flexible in the types of work that they could endure and were given access to. African men were given typically the heavier workloads in the fields, and little admission to domestic work. Noticeably there were numerous dependencies of African slave women to their owners, yet there was additional from the owner on their African women slaves. It seems African men were given more of an opportunity to not be so caged in compared to women that were so close to their owners quarters and families constant needs and affections.
Unfortunately one of the roles African women were forced into was reproduction, which helped boot populations growth. Sometimes the process ended up being a very violent one through rape or even prostitution depending on their circumstances and owner. This caused many issues with the idea and stances of what family and relationships with African women’s children were like compared to today’s societies. It was not so easy for African women to escape their roles because of these complex emotional ties which helped mold in itself a new culture during the slave trade.
The focus of your paper is very interesting and worthy of exploration. I think that as historians have sifted through the past, each generation has delved deeper into the "unseen" populations. In the 1970s and 1980s womens history became popular, but it still primarily focused on white/European origin women. More recent study has moved towards the disregarded female black/African population and your focus is an opportunity to evaluate the relationships of these women. I find that African women had a unique complexity with slavery because of the reproductive capabilities of their body, as well as sexual objects. As such they could be found laboring in the fields or domestic sphere all day, and subject to sexual brutality and abuses at night. Essentially leaving them without a time to be in possession of their own bodies. I would be curious in your studies to see how these complexities factor in to the relationships that are forged between African women, their masters, their husbands, and the perceptions of them by the population at large.
ReplyDeleteAs such, here are two additional sources that may be of use as you delve further in to your topic. One focusing on reproduction (specifically on contraceptives) and the other on the sexual abuses of African slave women.
Resisting Reproduction: Reconsidering Slave Contraception in the Old South
Liese M. Perrin
Journal of American Studies
Vol. 35, No. 2, Part 2: Warring in America: Encounters of Gender and Race (Aug., 2001), pp. 255-274
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British Association for American Studies
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27556967
"Cuffy," "Fancy Maids," and "One-Eyed Men": Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States
Edward E. Baptist
The American Historical Review
Vol. 106, No. 5 (Dec., 2001), pp. 1619-1650
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2692741
This is a great topic and I am glad that there is enough research out there so that you can write this bibliographic review. I am curious as to how the realities of marriage changed from Africa to North America and Latin America. Did the marriages that did take place between slaves (albeit probably not acknowledged by law) resemble African or European norms?
ReplyDeleteI've read Walter Johnson's "Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market," which takes a look at the actual buying and selling of slaves. A significant portion of it is dedicated to the value of attractive and fertile female slaves.
I think this will make for a very interesting essay. In particular I found it interesting that you will touch on the fact that women were much more confined or caged as the families were more dependant on them for daily chores and affections. When I read your topic I thought of Sally Hemings, perhaps one of the most famous female slaves, due to the fact that there have been multiple accounts that she had a relationship with Thomas Jefferson and perhaps even was the mother to his children. She might be someone worth looking into as her profile seems to fit the type of African woman slave life you are looking into.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/sally-hemings
I recognize that your topic is female slave roles during the slave trade. I found an article that examines slave roles in the south. it is titled Female Slaves: Sex Roles and Status in the Antebellum Plantation South, written by Deborah White. She focuses more on what female slaves could do as opposed to what male slaves could not do and she argues that slave families were based around the mother
ReplyDeleteThe topic is a little feminine for my liking but, that is okay, I guess :) The topic you have chosen is an interesting one, and one that deserves much attention. One of the books I am reading for my review also deals much with gender relations of slavery. It is from the view of white authors visiting the caribbean during the 17-19th centuries. It has more to do with the way women were treated, and how they were viewed by the slave owners. Here is one quote that shows how disgusting they were:
ReplyDeletestricken with sexual desire for the bodies of pubescent African females, the white male subject transforms their presence into an almost fetishized ®xation. The young `Negro virgins' struck him as `creatures, of such shapes, as would have puzzled Albrecht Du Èrer, the Great Master of Proportion, but to have imitated, and Titian or Andrea del Sarto, for softness of muscles, and curiositie of colouring'. He spends a further page and a half rapt in eroticized gazing at twin sisters wanton as the soyle that bred them, sweet as the fruits they fed on . . . [such] young Beauties force, and so commit rapes upon our affections. In summe had not my heart been ®xed fast in my breast, and dwelt there above sixty years, and therefore loath to leave his long kept habitation, I had undoubtedly left it between them for a Legacy. For so equal were there Beauties and my Love, as it was not nor could be, particular to either. (17)
Here is the link to the online book followed by the book information.
http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/lib/asulib/docDetail.action?docID=2000770
Sandiford, Keith Albert. Cultural Politics of Sugar : Caribbean Slavery & Narratives of Colonialism.
Port Chester, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2000. p 31.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/asulib/Doc?id=2000770&ppg=36
Copyright © 2000. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.
Good Luck on you paper it looks like you have a good idea which direction you want to go in.