Living in a wide range of circumstances and possessing the intersecting identity of both black and female, enslaved women of African descent had nuanced experiences of slavery. Historian Deborah Gray White explains that "the uniqueness of the African-American female's situation is that she stands at the crossroads of two of the most well-developed ideologies in America, that regarding women and that regarding the Negro." Beginning as early on in enslavement as the voyage on the Middle Passage, enslaved women received different treatment due to their gender. In regard to physical labor and hardship, enslaved women received similar treatment to their male counterparts, but they also frequently experienced sexual abuse at the hand of their enslavers who used stereotypes of black women's hypersexuality as justification.
Stereotypes and mythology
The justification of enslavers' treatment of enslaved women was often supported by Jezebel and Mammy stereotypes.
Characterizing black women as possessing an unusually high libido, the Jezebel character "first gained credence when Englishmen went to Africa to buy slaves." Both the attire that women wore (which was required by the tropical climate) and African traditions of polygamy were "attributed to the Africans' uncontrollable lust." By posing the Jezebel character as the absolute opposite of Victorian idealizations of womanhood, white enslavers used the stereotype to further other women of African descent and often to invalidate claims of sexual abuse.
The Mammy stereotype primarily "comes from memoirs written after the civil war." Such accounts portray Mammy as an expert in domesticity and the superior house servant. White accounts further characterize the Mammy as possessing a love for her enslavers' white children that would sometimes surpass her love for her own offspring. Like the Jezebel character, the Mammy stereotype is misleading yet grounded in enough reality "to lend credibility to stereotypes that would profoundly affect black women." The Mammy stereotype serves to soften the realities of slavery by painting a picture of house servants living in pleasant domesticity, when in fact "house servants were on call at all hours ... They probably had less privacy than field workers. They were always under the scrutiny of the white family and for more subject to their mood swings, particularly to those of the mistress, than other slaves."
Experiences of motherhood in slavery Enslaved black mothers had unique experiences in regard to maternal practices. Revered and abused for their procreative capacity, enslaved women were seen as a means of increasing the enslaved population. "Once slaveholders realized that the reproductive function of the female slave could yield a profit, the manipulation of procreative sexual relations became an integral part of the sexual exploitation of female slaves."
Additionally, enslaved mothers were often exploited by way of wet-nursing, a practice wherein the enslaved mother would suckle a white slaver's infant. "Enslaved women shared their breast milk when white slaveholders forced them to labor away from their infants, or when they sold mothers away from their suckling babies, or when nursing slaves died." Reinforcing the Mammy stereotype, the forced practice of wet-nursing often required enslaved mothers to prioritize their enslavers' infants rather than their own, and in fact could sometimes lead to the enslaved mother's infant dying of malnutrition from being weaned off of breast milk too early. Predating the transatlantic slave trade, European travelers viewed African women as having "superior ability to suckle" because of their long breasts that enabled "women to suckle their infants over their shoulders." These representations also led to "erotic images of enslaved wet nurses, in order for slaveholders to rationalize both the sexual exploitation of enslaved women and the care they provided to white offspring."
Because of the demands of enslavement, female slaves tended to rely on "shared and communal forms of mothering." Although likely unrealized by enslaved women, this shared form of mothering carried a continuity between Africa, where women typically relied on other women to raise their children with little help from men, and North America. "In all likelihood this helped preserve the part of African culture that put emphasis on motherhood, and the African mother probably passed it on to her daughters."
Sexual exploitation of enslaved women
White male enslavers frequently subjected their female slaves to sexual abuse. Using misconceptions of enslaved women as being unusually libidinous by nature, enslavers did not believe that enslaved women could be sexually assaulted. "Black men and women were thought to have such insatiable sexual appetites that they had to go beyond the boundaries of their race to get satisfaction. It was black women who, many claimed, tempted men of the superior caste." Sometimes leading to pregnancies that yielded mixed-race babies, the sexual abuse of enslaved women could prove to be incredibly disruptive: "Half-white children told a story of a white man's infidelity, a slave woman's helplessness (though this concerned few whites), and a white woman's inability to defy the social and legal constraints that kept her bound to her husband regardless of his transgressions." Unable to punish their husbands for their infidelity, the white women in question would often punish the enslaved woman: "To punish Black women ... mistresses were likely to attack with any weapon available – a fork, butcher knife, knitting needle, pan of boiling water. Some of the most barbaric forms of punishment resulting in the mutilation and permanent scarring of female servants were devised by white mistresses in the heat of passion."
A constant source of anxiety, sexual abuse was a possibility both from black and white men on plantations. Mothers often "schooled their daughters on avoiding the sexual overtures of these men." Unfortunately, "a mother could do little but hope that her daughter made it through adolescence and young womanhood unscathed by sexual abuse."
Colonial America
Virginia
From 1700 to 1740, an estimated 43,000 slaves were imported into Virginia, and almost all but 4,000 were imported directly from Africa.Saxton, Martha, Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early America, New York City, 2003, 121 Recent scholarship suggests that the number of women and men imported in this period was more or less equal and included a high number of children. As most were from West Africa, its cultures were central in the mid to late eighteenth-century slave life in Virginia. African values were prevalent and West African women's cultures had strong representations. Some prevalent cultural representations were the deep and powerful bonds between mother and child, and among women within the larger female community.Saxton, Martha, Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early America, New York City, 2003, 122-123 Among the Igbo ethnic group in particular (from present-day Nigeria), which comprised between one-third and one-half of incoming slaves in the early eighteenth century, female authority (the omu) "ruled on a wide variety of issues of importance to women in particular and the community as a whole."Saxton (2003), Being Good, p. 122 The Igbo represented one group of people brought to the Chesapeake, but in general, Africans came from an extremely diverse range of cultural backgrounds. All came from worlds where women's communities were strong,Saxton (2003), Being Good, p. 124 and were introduced into a patriarchal and violently racist and exploitative society; white men typically characterized all black women as passionately sexual, to justify their sexual abuse and miscegenation.Saxton (2003), Being Good, p. 125
Girls of African descent in Virginia were often uneducated and illiterate. African and African American female slaves occupied a broad range of positions. The southern colonies were majorly agrarian societies and enslaved women provided labor in the fields, planting and doing chores, but mostly in the domestic sphere, nursing, taking care of children, cooking, laundering, etc.
New England
Historian Ira Berlin distinguished between "slave societies" and "societies with slaves". By this standard, New England was considered to be a society with slaves, dependent on maritime trade and diversified agriculture, in contrast to the slave societies of the south, which were "socially, economically, and politically dependent on slave labor, had a large enslaved population, and allowed masters extensive power over their slaves unchecked by the law."Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck. "The Uniqueness of New England," Love of Freedom, New York, City, 29. New England had a small slave population and enslavers thought of themselves as patriarchs with the duty to protect, guide, and care for their slaves. Enslaved women in New England had greater opportunity to seek freedom than in other regions because of "the New England legal system, the frequency of manumission by owners, and chances for hiring out, especially among enslaved men, who seized the opportunity to earn enough money to purchase a wife and children."Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck. "The Uniqueness of New England," Love of Freedom, New York, City, 30.
Enslaved women largely occupied traditional domestic roles and were often hired out by the day. They worked mainly as maids, in the kitchen, the barn, and the garden. They did menial and servile tasks: polished family silver or furniture, helped with clothes and hair, drew baths, barbered the men, and completed domestic chores like sweeping, emptying chamber pots, carrying gallons of water a day, washing the dishes, brewing, looking after young children and the elderly, cooking and baking, milking the cows, feeding the chickens, spinning, knitting, carding, sewing, and laundering. Their daily work was less demanding than the field labor of enslaved women in other regions. Nonetheless, enslaved women in New England worked hard, often while enduring poor living conditions and malnutrition. "As a result of heavy work, poor housing conditions, and inadequate diet, the average black woman did not live past forty."Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck. "The Uniqueness of New England," Love of Freedom, New York, City, 35.
Enslaved women were given to white women as gifts from their husbands, and as wedding and Christmas gifts. The idea that New England masters treated their slaves with greater kindness in comparison to southern slave owners is a myth. They had little mobility, freedom, and lacked access to education and any training. "The record of slaves who were branded by their owners, had their ears nailed, fled, committed suicide, suffered the dissolution of their families, or were sold secretly to new owners in Barbados in the last days of the Revolutionary War before they become worthless seems sufficient to refute the myth of kindly masters. They lashed out at their slaves when they were angry, filled with rage, or had convenient access to horsewhip."Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck. "The Uniqueness of New England," Love of Freedom, New York, City, 36. Slaveholders sometimes forced female slaves into sexual relationships with enslaved men for the purpose of forced breeding. It was also not uncommon for slaveholders to rape and impregnate enslaved women.
Southern colonies