Women, Slavery, and Labor in the United States

Abstract

From the country’s founding, the United States’ dominant European-American culture included a patriarchal ideology which imposed a simplifying gender binary of male and female. Yet, when intertwined with the impacts of enslavement and racism, this ideology classified and treated African American women starkly differently from white women; it denied them any relative privileges of their gender. Enslaved Black women in the United States routinely did the same kinds of work as their male counterparts. Many women labored in agricultural fields; they even formed the majority of fieldworkers in some cases, such as with rice cultivation in South Carolina (Jones 2010, 15). Cast into “male categories” (Gillin 2014, 13), Black women were thus blocked from participation in the U.S. cult of domesticity in which white women of enough financial means avoided physical labor as part of their claim to femininity. Black women’s de-gendering is also clearly tied to race’s increasing entrenchment as a “historically produced technology of power” (Brown 1996, 110) that was used to justify an economic system dependent on enslaved labor. Jennifer L. Morgan has argued that “the entire system of hereditary racial slavery depended on slaveowners’ willingness to ignore cultural meanings of work that had been established in England and to make Africans work in ways the English could not conceive of working themselves” (Morgan 2011, 145). Black women’s de-gendering experience under slavery remains central to the development of Black feminist thought across the disciplines; specifically, theorists argue that, thus denied their identity by enslavers, Black women formed new gender constructs and new definitions of motherhood (Battle-Baptiste 2011, 42). This last point brings up an important additional truth: there was one way in which women alone labored under slavery – as mothers. Enslavers’ claims on Black women’s labor included their reproductive capacities. The sexual coercion and abuse of enslaved women was systematic in the antebellum U.S. South. The rape of Black women by white overseers and enslavers was widespread, a feature as central to the slavery system as labor exploitation (Baptist 2001, 1619–1621). Additionally, enslaved Black men were often selected by slave owners as sexual partners or “husbands” for enslaved women against both parties’ wills (Berry 2007, 81). In both cases, children remained a key objective; enslaved women’s reproductive labor ensured the next generation of people in bondage. Once these children were born, Black mothers typically found themselves forced to quickly return to agricultural labor – the care of their infants passed off to older children or the elderly infirm. Mothers also knew that their hold on these bonds remained tenuous as their children could be, and very often were, sold away from them by their enslavers. In the United States, Black mothers under slavery lost over half of their children to early death, whether through stillbirth or as infants or young children (Morgan 2011, 111). Enslaved women mourned the