Womanhood in the Black Body

“Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own” (Jacobs 11).

Black women have to be the most dominated figures in American history, by their slave masters and their male counterparts, but also the least represented. Their roles in history are often not highlighted though they were crucial to the foundation of this country. It is natural that whenever any figure in history is deemed significant, there must be claims of objection and resistance. Therefore, I must prove this claim to be true: Black women were the mechanism used to erect the great nation that is The United States of America by providing economic stability to the institution of slavery and upholding the virtue and stability of the white household.

Harriet Jacobs, an African American writer who escaped from slavery and later becomes an abolitionist speaker and reformer, gives critical insight for my argument in her slave narrative, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”. The work captures the characteristics of a slave narrative by depicting the cruelty of slavery and critiquing slavery and the South. Jacobs’ audience is white women and mothers, most likely Christian; she describes her longing for her children and critiques religious ideas like purity to evoke emotion in her audience. This is a technique that was commonly used in abolitionist works. She outlines the struggles of the female slave from childhood into adulthood and effectively provides examples that solidify my argument.

Girlhood: The Training Ground

The assimilation of black women into the crucial roles they play in the Antebellum South begins in childhood. Harriet Jacobs begins her narrative by discussing her childhood. Jacobs has a good childhood, until the age of twelve when her gracious owner dies. It is then that she begins to experience the reality of slavery. Once given to her new owner, she is assimilated into the plantation culture like most young girls.

According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, “As the children neared the age of ten, planters began making distinctions between the genders. At this time slave girls either were trained to do nonagricultural labor in domestic settings or joined their elders in the fields.” Jacobs was trained to perform household labor. What a psychological toll it must take on a child to learn they are a slave, to be taught they are not owners of themselves, but property, chattel. Jacobs says, “I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away” (Jacobs 1).

Black Women  as an Economic Stimulant and Stabilizer

Many would rather not believe that the Southern or even American economy has been built on the backs of African American slaves, but scholars are now affirming this belief. In an article discussing American capitalism and slavery, Edward Baptiste, the author of The Half Has Never Been Told, was quoted asserting that “The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made America powerful and rich is not an idea people are necessarily happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.”

During the slave trade, African women were purchased to continue the institution of slavery. An African woman was the equivalent to any female cattle; their purpose was to produce more slaves thus stabilizing the future workforce in the Southern States. The black woman effectively replenished America’s Southern work-force.

Laws were created to sustain this breeding process and disallow the freedom of slave children no matter their paternity. In Harriet Jacobs narrative, she discusses these laws when she is forced to send her lover away. “Even if he could have obtained permission to marry me while I was a slave, the marriage would give him no power to protect me from my master. It would have made him miserable to witness the insults I should have been subjected to. And then, if we had children, I knew they must ‘follow the condition of the mother'” (Jacobs 7). Harriet had known a free black man since she was young and wanted to marry him, but her slave master was staunchly opposed to his property being loaned to someone else. Instead of putting her lover in harm’s way she encourages him to leave. This highlights the vastly economic aspect of the institution of slavery and that these human beings were not free agents to love rather they were property. This law is a stark reminder that even if Jacobs were allowed to marry her lover who was a free man, she and any child she bore were still considered the property that would continue the institution of slavery. Black women weren’t just victims of the cruelty of slavery, they were stable financial investments that stimulated the Southern economy and guaranteed the continuation of slavery.

Black Women as the Backbone of the Southern Household

The home and the family are important themes in romantic Southern Literature. The family and the home were to be protected and there were laws to ensure the virtue of the family.

While on the topic of virtue, Jacobs also discusses the futility of imposing Christian/Southern values concerning purity on the black female slave.

“But, O, ye happy women, whose purity has been sheltered from childhood, who have been free to choose the objects of your affection, whose homes are protected by law, do not judge the poor desolate slave girl too severely! If slavery had been abolished, I, also, could have married the man of my choice; I could have had a home shielded by the laws; and I should have been spared the painful task of confessing what I am now about to relate; but all my prospects had been blighted by slavery. I wanted to keep myself pure; and, under the most adverse circumstances, I tried hard to preserve my self-respect; but I was struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon Slavery; and the monster proved too strong for me. I felt as if I was forsaken by God and man; as if all my efforts must be frustrated; and I became reckless in my despair.”

Harriet Jacobs does a phenomenal job of producing a work that now allows us to analyze the intersection between slavery and gender, by describing the conditions of slavery for women and criticizing Southern values and how they are impossible to apply to the slave woman. In this quote, Jacobs speaks directly to her audience to criticize the functioning of southern values, like purity, for women who were slaves. Jacobs compares the lives of slave women versus her white female audience in this quote. She shows her audience what it’s like to not own your body and be presented with an impossible choice of whether to save your purity, claim your own body/freedom, or passively allow all of these to be taken from you. She criticizes purity is such way as to ask her audience, “If you value the purity of women, how can you uphold the institution of slavery that prohibits many women from maintaining their purity?”

Much like the protection of purity, the protection of the home and family were only extended to the white families and the white households. However, many forget that the negro female slaves were crucial figures in the white household. Black women not only cared for their own children, that were used to satisfy economic stability, but they also fed and raised the children of their slave owners.

When discussing her childhood, Jacobs praises her grandmother, saying, “But as she grew older she evinced so much intelligence, and was so faithful, that her master and mistress could not help seeing it was for their interest to take care of such a valuable piece of property. She became an indispensable personage in the household, officiating in all capacities, from cook and wet nurse to seamstress” (Jacobs 1).  Jacob’s grandmother is the perfect example of the black woman upholding the virtue of the white southern household. In Southern literature, the romanticized South is only possible with the positioning of the black woman in the white household.

African American women are vastly under-represented in U.S. History and the study of the intersection between slavery and gender in peer-reviewed journals is hard to come by, but Harriet Jacobs provides us with one of the few accounts of slavery for black women. She shows us the assimilation of black women into slavery from girlhood. She describes the heartbreaking reality of not having ownership of one’s body and the consequences of claiming this freedom for herself. She shows us the female slave’s role in the economic stability of slavery as well as her role in the household. Most importantly she injects a female voice into American Literature, an account by a woman about women for women.

References

“Antebellum Women in NC.” Weapons in the War of 1812 | NCpedia, http://www.ncpedia.org/history/1776-1860/antebellum-women.

DeRosa, Paul. “Was America Built By Slaves?” The American Interest, 7 Aug. 2017, http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/01/11/was-america-built-by-slaves/.

Justinedecker. “Growing Up A Slave.” afram101autumn2015, 19 Nov. 2015, afram101autumn2015.wordpress.com/2015/11/19/growing-up-a-slave/.

“Slave Women.” New Georgia Encyclopedia, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/slave-women.

TheGrio. “Photo Series Illustrates America’s Obsession with Black Women’s Features.” TheGrio, TheGrio, 6 Mar. 2016, thegrio.com/2016/03/06/photo-series-illustrates-americas-obsession-with-black-womens-features/.