"Us Colored Women Had to Go Though A Plenty": Sexual Exploitation of African-American Slave Women

Abstract

Southern slaves were happiest, and, in some sense the freest people in the world, wrote George Fitzhugh, Virginia proslavery defender. He claimed bondwomen did little hard work and were protected from the despotism of their husbands by their masters. In her famous diary, Mary Chesnut noted that the female slaves take life easily. Marrying is the amusement of their life. Many antebellum southerners thought the female slaves were sensuous and promiscuous and cited the easy chastity of the bondwomen. Since associations were made between promiscuity and reproduction, the desired increase of the slave population seemed be evidence of the bondwoman's passion. A slaveowner in northern Mississippi told Fredrick Law Olmsted that slaves breed faster than white folks, a 'mazin' sight, you know; begin younger, and, he added, they don't very often wait be married.1 Bondwomen's perception of the slave experience is in marked contrast the slaveowners'. In her remarkable autobiography, Linda Brent, a mulatto female slave, noted, Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded the burden common all, have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own.2 Female bondage was worse than male bondage because the female slave was both a woman and a slave in a patriarchial regime where males and females were unequal, whether white or black. Because were slaves, African-American women were affected by the rule of the patriarch in more ways and a greater degree than the white women in the Big House. The size of the food allotment, brutal whippings, slave sales, and numerous other variables influenced the bondwoman's view of the patriarchy. Yet because she was a woman, her view, like that of the white woman, was also gender related. According Anne Firor Scott, the most widespread source of discontent among white women centered around their inability to control their own fertility.3 On the other hand, the bondwoman's entire sex life was subject the desires of her owner. This essay will, therefore, deal only with the bondwomen's perspective from the viewpoint of gender, using twentieth-century interviews with female ex-slaves who were at least twelve or thirteen years of age at the time of emancipation. Of the 514 women in this category, 205, or almost forty percent, made comments of this nature. Undoubtedly, the reluctance of ex-bondwomen discuss such private matters, especially with white