Female slavery in the United States
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.
Characterizing black women as possessing an unusually high libido, the Jezebel character "first gained credence when Englishmen went to Africa to buy slaves."
"[3] 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.
"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.
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.
Some prevalent cultural representations were the deep and powerful bonds between mother and child, and among women within the larger female community.
[8] 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.
"[9] The Igbo represented one group of people brought to the Chesapeake, but in general, Africans came from an extremely diverse range of cultural backgrounds.
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.
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.
"As a result of heavy work, poor housing conditions, and inadequate diet, the average black woman did not live past forty.
Early on, slaves in the South worked primarily in agriculture, on farms and plantations growing indigo, rice, and tobacco; cotton became a major crop after the 1790s.
As house slaves, women were domestic servants: cooking, sewing, acting as maids, and rearing the planter's children.
During the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) enslaved women served on both sides, the Loyalist army as well as the Patriots, as nurses, laundresses, and cooks.
[19] The Crown did keep promising manumission slaves, evacuating them along with troops in the closing days of the war, and resettling more than 3,000 Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia, and others in the Caribbean, and England.
Educated in Latin, Greek, and English, Wheatley wrote a collection of poems that asserted that Africans, as children of God just like Europeans, deserved respect and freedom.
Also in 1780 in Pennsylvania, the legislature enacted "a gradual emancipation law that directly connected the ideals of the Revolution with the rights of the African Americans to freedom.
A St. Louis trader took a crying baby from its mother, both on their way to be sold, and made a gift of it to a white woman standing nearby because its noise was bothering him.
Little girls as young as seven were frequently sold away from their mothers: "Mary Bell was hired out by the year to take care of three children starting when she was seven.
John Mullanphy noted that he had lived with him a four-year-old mulatto girl, whom he willed to the Sisters of Charity in the event of his death.
[30] Although the word "girl" applied to any working female without children, white families preferred slaves because of cost effectiveness.
She provided freedom for daughters to devote themselves to their self-development and relieved mothers from exhausting labor while requiring no financial or emotional maintenance, "no empathy".
"Unfinished childhoods and brutal separations punctuated the lives of most African American girls, and mothers dreamed of freedom that would not impose more losses on their daughters.
Cotton was the leading cash crop during this time, but slaves also worked on rice, corn, sugarcane, and tobacco plantations, clearing new land, digging ditches, cutting and hauling wood, slaughtering livestock, and making repairs to buildings and tools.
On small farms, women and men performed similar tasks, while on larger plantations, males were given more physically demanding work.
Therefore, they were less mobile than enslaved men, who often assisted their masters in the transportation of crops, supplies, and other materials, and were often hired out as artisans and craftsmen.
Although a female slave's labor in the field superseded child-rearing in importance, the responsibilities of childbearing and childcare greatly circumscribed the life of an enslaved woman.
Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States, is believed to have fathered six mixed-race children (four survived to adulthood) with one of his female slaves, Sally Hemings, a woman three-quarters white and half-sister to his late wife, who served as the widower's concubine for more than two decades.
In the case of Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, her slaver, Dr. James Norcom, had sexually abused her for years.
[37] Although Harriet Jacobs managed to escape to the North with her children, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 still put their freedom at risk due to Dr. Norcom's family continuing to pursue her.
