Introduction
Slavery is perhaps the darkest period in the history of the African American race because of the cruelty and suffering that they faced. Historical records and other accounts of the era have tried to paint a picture of forceful capture of Africans, treatment as trade items, and involuntary to work in plantations and mines under harsh conditions and punishment. A slight deviation from such a discourse has been an exploration of how the women were treated during slavery. One can expect that their plight was not any better than the men working in the mines and plantations. Special considerations for women may include sexual treatment and their roles in the slave acquisition where black women exploited through slave breeding and other degrading practices. The whole slavery enterprise relied on slave women as much as it did on the men. Even though none of the two genders had it easier than the other, it is interesting to examine how slave owners treated men, women and children. This research explores how women were treated in the North American colonies and other regions.
The argument presented in this research is that slave breeding, violence, sexual exploitation, and discrimination represent how African American (enslaved) women were handled during servitude, while the whites were unequally treated. This argument is backed by research and historical accounts of the era, including women studies that have paid special attention to the plight and empowerment of women pre- and post-slavery. A closer examination of these issues will explain what it meant to be a woman during slavery. It is important to acknowledge that the slavery across the 13 North American colonies was different. However, the practices that the colonists engaged in are deemed to be similar in many aspects, including involuntary servitude, slave breeding, and cruel punishments. However, the current research focuses on the gender disparities across the North American colonies explaining the differences between the black and white women.
The research begins by presenting evidence of slave breeding and sexual exploitation. A critical examination of the whole idea of reproduction is also presented to establish how it was perceived and the reasons behind such perceptions. Secondly, the issue of domestic violence and the concept of ‘other’ explores the extent to which women were mistreated within their families and their overall discrimination. The general treatment of the women by slave masters is examined under degradation and cruelty which focuses on the working conditions and punishments. Lastly, a comparison between the enslaved women and the whites explores similarities and differences between the treatments of women from both races.
Reproduction, Sexual Exploitation, and Slave Breeding
Reproduction and slave breeding is a sensitive subject because it touches on the commodification of both the women and their offspring. Some historians have used a more subtle term, ‘reproductive labor’, to describe the alienation of women from their children. The slave labor required a constant supply of slaves and the slave trade provided an avenue for slave acquisition. Changes in the slave trade and its ultimate abolishment meant that European colonialists in the North American and other territories considered ‘breeding slaves’ from the existing stock. Such stock was in the form of women who were required to reproduce and give up their children as slave laborers. Several accounts of these events can help illustrate the devastation of such an approach to slave labor acquisition.
Slave reproduction was considered to be good in the North American colonies, the region where the greatest slave population growth was recorded. An estimated half a million captive Africans were transported to North America. By 1825, however, the numbers had grown to become the largest slave populace comprising over a third of all slaves in the Americas. The inhabitant growth may not necessarily have been the result of slave breeding practices but other factors such as a more balanced sex ratio, lower suicide and death rates, and fewer absentee owners among others. Such factors favored natural reproduction up until the importation of slaves was no longer possible. According to authors such as Barclay, the end of slave trade resulted in the slave masters favoring more fertile women who became more prized than even the best men working in the plantations and other occupations. A quote from Thomas Jefferson clarifies this point: “a woman who brings a child every two years is more profitable than the best man on the farm.” At this point, the women were treated as reproductive machines to profit the slave masters.
Slave breeding exercises went beyond women being forced to give birth to children. Other accounts of the practice describe the concept of ‘wet nursing’ which entailed women being forced or paid to breastfeed children from other women. An important point to note, however, is that even the white women wet-nursed enslaved infants, but only to manipulate the enslaved women’s motherhood for the benefits of the slaveholders. Such practices may have been more common in the antebellum South as compared to the North American colonies but the idea of using women as reproductive objects to meet the ends of the slave masters remains. The European white women in colonial North America exploited a contingent process because of the presence of unequal power relationships where the wealthier women used those from the lower classes to breastfeed their children. In the context of reproduction and sexual exploitation, these practices are an embodiment of how lowly women were perceived within these colonies.
Slave breeding practices were based on the principle of hereditability whereby enslaved women gave birth to enslaved children. Whether or not the children were to be taken away from their mothers at young ages to work as slaves, the fact remained that the whole premise of slave labor depended on the reproducing women. The idea of racial slavery can be seen as an extension of the slave trade where one race was understood as dispossessed and outside the normal family and community networks. Racial slavery was simply used to justify the mass enslavement of people. The main focus here, however, is the role of women in racial slavery. According to Morgan, the maternal possibilities of the enslaved women became the primary vehicle by which the concretization of meaning was achieved. Such constructions of meaning were done lone before they became embedded into law. The 1819 Laws of Virginia, for example, stated that the children were to declared either free or slave depending on the condition of their mother. Such a law meant that even the children born of white men with Black enslaved women would be rendered slaves.
Another rationalization of slave breeding and related practices was that the reproductive labor of the enslaved women accompanied the manual labor in the sugar and tobacco fields. As such, the women were treated as commodities the same way that men did, only that the women had additional contributions in the form of new generations of slaves. The women were not given any special treatment unless they were among the most reproductive where the motive was to make sure they contributed as much or more than the male slaves. Slave breeding was a tradeoff that the enslaved women had to make between working in the fields and staying at hope to give birth to children for the slaveholder.
Slave breeding was not merely an act of allowing women to give birth to enslaved children. Some historians reveal that under ordinary circumstances, the slave populations did not grow due to the declined fertility rates among the enslaved women. Even natural reproduction could not have been very successful in the North American colonies without deliberate efforts by the state and colonial masters to increase birth rates and reduce child mortality rates. With the slaves being commodified, it would not come as a surprise to learn that the reproducing women were given special treatments to improve their fertility. For the slave manager, it meant getting men and women in pronatalist relationships to facilitate and sustain high birth rates. The concerns of the women’s health and resistance to the pronatalist regimes have also been explored in literature, especially among the feminists and researchers in women’s studies. The treatment of women as ‘stock’ for slaves, however, did have a devastating effect on their health, including mental and psychological health.
The dangers of slave breeding and attempts to improve the fertility of enslaved women is a subject that needs further investigation. This is because unlike modern medical and health advances, there were not proper healthcare during the colonization era that could deal with any adverse health outcomes of the women. An account of the medicines used to improve fertility in the North American colonies is presented by. These authors express that botanical health remedies were used for reproductive health before 1900. Such remedies included uterine tonics made from either ancient herbal medicines or toxic chemicals. The health problems caused by these remedies included kidney and heart problems. It is not stated expressly here that the colonial masters forced these reproductive remedies to the enslaved women. However, the argument remains that it was a dangerous affair to force women to reproduce more and to use life-threatening medications in an attempt to improve their fertility.
Some accounts of the health issues facing the enslaved women during the slave breeding practices reflect painful experiences for the women. The overview of the medical remedies for reproduction purposes explained by Lans et al. are echoed by Prather et al. who explain how limited access to health care affected the women. The healthcare offered to the reproducing women was majorly in the form of medical experimentation. There are accounts of reproductive experimental surgeries conducted without anaesthesia that were intended to treat some illnesses during childbirth among the enslaved women. Other reproductive surgeries included ovariotomy and cesarean sections. Such experiments were intended to perfect those procedures that would later be applied across the entire population of enslaved women. Such painful experiences are the highlight of how much the slaveholders needed to maximize the productivity of their ‘stock.’
Sexual exploitation is discussed separately from reproduction and slave breeding because women were also subjected to degrading sexual treatment. Sexual exploitation was also a result of the slaves being treated as commodities and as people dispossessed outside the social and family networks. Other scholarly works use the concepts of ‘savage’ and otherness’ to express how the mistreatment of Africans and Native Americans was justified. Race-based mistreatment occurred throughout the enslavement period lasting 246 years and it involved Africans and their descendants. Being subjected to reproductive and sexual acts of violence. The violence was not specific to women as their partners would face the same treatment. Sexual and reproductive exploitation was legalized meaning the women had no control of their own sexual life. Some historians estimate that 58% of all the slave women aged between 15 and 30 years were sexually assaulted by both the colonial masters and other white men in the North American colonies. Their vulnerability emanated from the fact that these women were nor offered legal protection against such assaults by the white men.
The enslaved women were denied control of their own reproduction rights. They could not form willing relationships with the enslaved men because their male partners were either lynched and/or castrated as the white men sought to assert their dominance them. With the marital relationships disrupted and the women needed to give birth to more slaves, it means that women were forced into sexual relationships with other men. Such is the pronatalist regime where marital relationships were replaced with reproductive relationships. The strong women were sold by the slave masters as ‘breeders’ where they were constantly sexually abused and exploited. As an act of resistance, many of these women aborted their pregnancies and in the process increased the health risks they faced. The slave breeding, therefore, can also be constructed as an act of sexual violence and exploitation.
Besides sexual exploitation for reproduction purposes, the enslaved women faced sexual abuse from their masters and other white men as a result of the absence of legal protection. Some accounts of sexual violence indicate that women faced statutory rape from their masters who sought to fulfil their sexual desires. Such sexual relationships were illicit and any resistance by the enslaved women to the sexual advances from their masters was often met with violence. The major issue was that the women would normally lose their sexual honor due to such sexual practices. In some cases, the married enslaved women would face further problems with their husbands if news spread that they were having sexual affairs with their masters. One instance described by Proctor indicate that one master, after successfully seducing a woman into an illicit sexual relationship, drove away her husband and imprisoned her in his home to secure sexual access to the woman. Such incidences are evidence of women being treated as sexual abuse when sexual exploitation was not meant for reproduction purposes.
The topic of health and fertility may also be used to examine the treatment of white women in the North American colonies. The women’s activities and behaviors were perceived to affect their reproduction. For the white women, their independence was curtailed because it was seen as a potential threat to their fertility. Such treatment of white women was founded on the thesis that the white population would go extinct or lose their superiority in the face of rapidly reproducing black population. Sterilization of the black women without consent and full knowledge as will be discussed in the section below was a practice fuelled by these fears and efforts to control the rise of the black population. The idea here, however, is that even the white women during slavery were also seen as reproductive objects to fulfil the desires of the powerful colonists.
Cruelty against Women
While much of the discussion on women health and sexual exploitation presented in the earlier sections focus on reproduction health, there are other health issues and problems that could only be classified as cruelty. Lynching was used for both genders as punishment for those who pursued racial equality through the civil rights movements. For the women, the cruelty extended to gang rapes and genital mutilation before they were lynched. Towards the end of slavery, the focus on the slave masters turned to the control of the black population in the colonies. The mechanisms deployed included eugenic programs that forced the enslaved women to undergo sterilization without their consent or even full knowledge that the procedures were irreversible. The procedures may have been refuted by scientists but that did not stop the states from practicing them. Formal eugenic programs enforced compulsory sterilization from the early 1900s. The nature of the cruelty can be illustrated using the super coil that was used by young women. These coils caused uncontrollable bleeding, abdominal pain, anemia, and hysterectomies. Unintentional abortions were also one of the major results of the super coil.
The essence of slave labor in the North American colonies was cruelty to the slaves effected either due to prejudice or as a tool to assert dominance and enforce submission. The cruelty described by some historians did not necessarily occur in the fields or homes as all interactions anywhere between the whites and blacks were in the form of mistreatment of the blacks. An account by Kpohoue describes the treatment of women on a slave ship where it emerges that the journeys were extremely traumatizing. The slave sales occurred in ships where women were ‘herded’ together on the slave ships where degradation based on race was carried out. Below the ship’s deck, exiled and thrown-away women faced a future of unpaid labor. Misogyny and patriarchal oppression are also keywords used in these accounts to explain the fact that the treatment of women was based on gender prejudice where women were perceived as ‘of or for men.’ It did not matter, therefore, whether it was in the context of slavery or otherwise that women were being mistreated and perceived as second-class human beings.
The cruelty meted out to the African American slaves was in many cases a ‘public spectacle’ meaning that the punishments were performed in public as a warning to others. Women were not exempted from these punishments. The execution of a woman named Molly on December 17, 1768, illustrates this point. Molly was hanged by the neck for an hour in a location specifically selected to ensure a public spectacle. She was accused of attempting to poison John Denny who was a member of the Council (he was not her owner). A huge crowd of slaves was gathered to witness the event, further indicating the extent to which the mercilessness and cruelty were lashed out to the slaves of all gender. Such real-life accounts are not unique to the North American colonies as almost any region where slavery was practiced has its tales of cruelty to women.
An example of other regions where women cruelty was abundant is Jamaica and other Caribbean colonies. The slave masters commonly stripped women of their clothes to completely expose their bodies as they whipped the enslaved women. Besides the physical torture, the women in such scenarios were also stripped off their modesty and decency. Even under special circumstances such as pregnancy, the same level of harshness was used. There were cases where the slave masters would end the lives of both the mothers and their children, born or unborn. Such tales continue to express that not even childbirth was adequate to warrant relaxation. Mothers and expectant women were expected to carry on with the rigorous labor responsibilities. Such conditions meant that most women would miscarriage or deliver stillborn children because of physically exhausting labor. Besides those regions practicing slave breeding, such cruelty meant that the slave masters could not sustain their slave numbers through reproduction.
Sexual abuse is perhaps one of the greatest acts of cruelty meted against black women by the white slave masters. Accounts of women suing their owners for sexual abuse present evidence that the enslaved women were subjected to rape and other forced sexual acts, including being locked in homes. The experiences of the enslaved women not only in North American colonies but also across the Americas have been used by some scholars to make the argument that the cruelty shown to the women was because of their gender. Womanhood determined how the slave masters would employ and/or punish the women. In some accounts, it is evident that the women suffered what can be considered a double burden; that is – as both producers and reproducers and as sexual objects. The double burden is also manifested by the fact that the women worked as hard as men did and were punished with the same cruelty as the men did.
Marginalization of Women
Excluding slave reproduction, cruelty, and sexual exploitation, other forms of treatment of women in the North American colonies can be examined under the notion of marginalization. Both the Native and Black American during the slavery period were poorly treated (both gender). However, the women were treated as second class citizens, including the whites. Gender inequalities across the colonies did not discriminate against the white women as other forms of mistreatment did. The wife was considered a property of the husband where the man held more powers both within the household and in the public domain. Evidently, the social and political relationship between the genders was founded on power and manifested in dominance and submission. The topic of gender inequalities is the first instance in this research where white women are also included in the examination of how women were treated.
The marginalization, however, affected the African American women more than it did with the whites. Such an observation can be supported by the fact that among the slaves forming marital relationships, the women were more likely to be dominated by the men. The domination meant that the women were slaves both within their own households and within the community itself. The women would, therefore, be seen as serving two masters as they worked for their slave masters and their husbands and families. These opinions have been expressed by many female writers attacking the patriarchal domination among the black community. Even towards the end of slavery, the African American women would not be completely free within a patriarchal system.
The marginalization of women, however, was a power struggle as explained by authors such as Wood. The colonists made every effort to implement restrictions to make sure women did not rise to power. They used ancient texts of female subordination to create and maintain what they considered a naturalness of the political order. Additionally, women were perceived as a gender that needed protection by the males. The laws ensured the immobility of women and legal justifications kept women in lower social status as compared to men. The reasoning for marginalizing white women is not particularly clear because it is not apparent how women in power would affect the slavery regime and the authority of the white race over the black. Chauvinism, therefore, would be one of the most logical explanations where men did not want to lose their power over the women.
The women fertility could be seen as one of the causes or indicators of marginalization. As mentioned earlier on, the women were denied their independence from the men because of fears that independence would be detrimental to their fertility. Men needed their women to be fertile enough meaning fertility is a reason for marginalization. Women being seen as reproduction objects rather human beings with the same human rights is the evidence of marginalization. During the civil rights movement period among the slaves, the black women were also targeted for the same reasons. Their activeness in such activities was seen as being hypersexual, a perception that fuelled the eugenic practices. Their grievances were dismissed because they were not seen as emanating from social inequality but as driven by their lasciviousness. The marginalization of the enslaved women meant that their issues would not be taken as seriously as those of men would.
From a feminist perspective, the double burdens were what made slavery particularly more terrible for the women as compared to the men. Even the resistance movements were tougher for the women because they had to accomplish more than the one goal of liberation. The women had to protect themselves from sexual abuse and violence, cater for their families, pursue liberation for themselves and their children, and express themselves culturally. The marginalization meant that there were not enough protections for the women which explains why women were subjected to terror, humiliation, exploitative labor, sexual and nonsexual exploitation, and pain and suffering all at the same time. The concept of otherness, in the context of marginalization, would perfectly fit the scenario where women are the ‘other’ and the men are the conquerors. The men had achieved political and social power and they reserved all human rights as opposed to the women who were subjected to the authority of the men.
White versus Black Women
A quick comparison of the treatment of the women between the whites and blacks should help explain that indeed the women were the ‘other’ while the men were in control of social, economic, and political power. The injustices among the women as examined in the above sections have revealed that it is indeed the enslaved black women who went through the worst experiences during slavery. Their accounts would, understandably, overshadow treatment of the white women, an observation manifested by the fact that most of the historical records of cruelty, reproduction, and marginalization during the slavery period pay greater attention to the black women. However, the themes of fertility and reproduction, as well as marginalization have shown that there are instances where the white women were not spared. Most importantly, the issue of fertility will be shown herein to be critical because of the population control efforts.
Both the white and black women were seen as reproductive objects to meet the slave masters’ ends. In this case, the black women needed to supply slaves to the slave masters where practices of slave breeding and wet-nursing ensured high birth success rates and low child mortality rates. Among the white women, however, the issues of fertility arose with the need to control the black population. Their fertility was important as they were needed to replenish the diminishing white population relative to the black population. Another area where common treatment of white and black women was revealed in this research is marginalization. As examined earlier, the white women were considered second class citizens by the colonists who made sure the women never rose to power. The black women had bigger challenges with their slave masters and hence their marginalization was merely one of the many terrifying experiences.
On the contrary, black women faced more terrifying treatment than white women. Gang rape and lynching are just a few examples of treatments that were meted against the black women and not the whites. The laws protected white women from such crimes but failed to do so with the black women. Sexual exploitation and abuse were, therefore, cases experienced only by black women. Additionally, the white women were never subjected to forced and unpaid labor as the black women did. Apparently, the black women were simply perceived as slaves and commodities to be exploited in whatever manner that suited their masters.
Conclusion
The treatment of women during the colonial period in the North American colonies is examined here with the primary argument being that the enslaved women were subjected to sexual abuse, violence, and exploitation. The research focuses on three major themes: reproduction, sexual violence, and slave breeding, cruelty, and marginalization. The enslaved women experienced more terrifying as sexual abuse and exploitation through slave breeding and wet-nursing meant they did not have the right to control their own sexuality and reproduction. In terms of cruelty, the enslaved women were treated as harshly as were the men. Marginalization, however, is where the white women featured in this research as they were denied the opportunities to pursue social and political power. In other instances, the white women too were used as reproduction objects by the white colonists who saw the rising black population as a threat. The fertility of white women was perceived as the only option to sustain white dominance.
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