The chattel slavery of Africans instituted in the Americas tended to oppress not only by race but also by gender. Treated little differently from their male counterparts, black slave women endured a system of brutality that sought not only to exploit them for their labor, but their sexuality and even their reproduction. They would become de-sexualized as "Mammies" and laborers, and at the same time hyper-sexualized as wanton "Jezebels." In this way their very gender became an everyday issue which as enslaved women they had to deal with uniquely. Yet against these seemingly insurmountable odds many would not only survive, but also resist. In narratives during and after slavery, the lives and struggles of these "ordinary" women were recorded. These are some of their stories.


Beyond mythic forgeries like the now discredited Willie Lynch Document, what is often lost in any examination of slavery is that enslaved men and women reacted against servitude through a variety of means. While much focus is placed on large scale revolts, in actuality slave resistance often took place in smaller or individual acts. These could be verbal; they could be physical; or they could at times be lethal. Resistance could also be carried out against the instruments or property of the slave regime, which commonly included the breaking of tools and killing of livestock. Even more common were non-violent acts of resistance, which included feigning illness to slow down labor or production, stealing plantation property, running away, or breaking slave codes and laws. Thus the term "resistance," when used in regard to slavery, aptly refers to the totality of methods used by the enslaved to resist, to whatever degree, their enslavement, oppression, and dehumanization.

Examining acts of physical and violent resistance on the part of enslaved black women requires that one first consider the social atmosphere in which these women lived and participated. The exploitative nature of slavery rendered the antebellum society in which it flourished one of systematic brutality and violence, against which gender offered no shield.

"Beat women! Why sure he beat women," ex-slave Elizabeth Sparks said of her former master, "Beat women jes' lak men. . . . Beat women naked an' wash 'em down in brine." Ex-slave Susan Hamilton witnessed much the same: "I see women hung from de ceilin' of buildin's an' whipped …until w'en dey wus taken down, dere wusn't breath in de body."

Such brutality against slave women was committed by masters, mistresses and their children, including numerous underlings such as drivers and overseers, and was connected to a system of social mores, customs, and values that protected the master's rights of property. Ex-slave Frank Cooper recounted the severe beating of his mother who was rendered unconscious by three white women using a whip and a heavy board, "because they had no butter for their biscuits and cornbread." Ex-slave William Moore related how his mother was beaten by her master with a handsaw, the teeth of the instrument being applied to her back, over displeasure with her cooking. "Marse Tom got mad at the cookin' and grabs her by the hair," Moore said, "and drug her out the house and grabs the saw off the tool bench and whips her."

When it came to beatings and whippings, age was as meaningless a defense as gender for enslaved black women. Ex-slave Mary Estes Peters' mother was beaten over the head with a skillet as a child for not completing work left for her while the mistress was at Sunday mass. An anonymous ex-slave related how her master beat an old woman severely, breaking a "long piece of iron" over her head. Even pregnancy did not lessen the likelihood of a whipping or beating.

Rev. Wamble of Gary, Indiana recalled "When the women slaves were in an advanced stage of pregnancy, they were made to lie face down in a specially dug depression in the ground and were whipped." Marie Hervey said much the same of her time in slavery: "They used to take pregnant women and dig a hole in the ground and put their stomachs in it and whip them."

As commonplace as whipping was in this culture of coercive violence, various other methods of sanctioned brutality were employed to both humiliate and torment. Former slave Mrs. Thomas Johns recounted a white mistress who would pin the lower lip of slave women to their bosom as punishment. "The woman would go 'round all day with her head drew down thataway and slobberin'," said Johns, "There was knots on the lips… where the needle had been stuck in it." Ex-slave Sallie Crane recalled that she was made to wear a buck and gag in her mouth for three days, which she said resulted in maggots eating away at her flesh. "I couldn't eat or drink," she recounted, "couldn't even catch the slobber that fell from my mouth and run down my chest till the flies settled on it…."

Severe as whippings were, they could easily cross the line into more dangerous abuse. Ex-slave Ida Henry of Oklahoma for instance recalled how the white mistress of the house stabbed a black female kitchen slave in the eye with a fork and put it out, because a potato was not fully cooked. In a culture where brutality was sanctioned and accepted, such abuse could as well cross the line into death.

Ex-slave Mittie Blakely of Indiana related the story of an elderly slave woman who was placed on wooden boards above a pit and beaten by her master "until the blood gushed from her body" and she "bled to death." Leah Garrett recounted how her master, after becoming angry with her young cousin for dropping a white infant, "picked up a board and hit dis pore little chile 'cross de head and kilt her right dar."

Former slave Mary Armstrong recalled vividly the killing of her infant sister by her mistress. "She come and took the diaper offen my little sister and whipped till the blood jes' ran," Mary said, "jes 'cause she cry like all babies do, and it kilt my sister." Ex-slave Analiza Foster of North Carolina recalled the beating death of a pregnant woman as passed down by her mother: De 'oman wuz pregnant an' she fainted in de fiel' at de plow. De driver …he takes de long bull whup an' he cuts long gashes all over her shoulders an' raised arms, den he walks off an' leabes her dar fer a hour in de hot sun . . . den de driver comes out wid a pan full of vinegar, salt an' red pepper an' he washes de gashes. . . . De 'oman faints an' he digs her up, but in a few minutes she am stone dead."

At the core of violence against slave women was their unique vulnerability to sexual exploitation. The Southern "cult of true womanhood," reserved for white women, excluded black women from the female sphere of domesticity, denying them the contemporary female virtues of "sexual purity" and "chastity," while relegating them to an almost sub-human level in the antebellum social hierarchy. "We hardly knowed our names," recalled ex-slave Sallie Crane, "We was cussed for so many bitches and sons of bitches and bloody bitches, and blood of bitches. . . . We never heard our names scarcely at all."

For slave women the prospect of rape and sexual exploitation was a daily reality. Recast under a caricature termed "Jezebel," slave women were painted as sexually loose and voracious. In this way white men could paint themselves not as rapists, but (in a most perverse irony) victims of slave women's uncontrollable sexuality. For slave women, there was little if any redress. In examining the life of a slave named Celia, historian Melton McLaurin found that no state laws shielded slave women from rape. "In Missouri, sexual assault on a slave woman by white males was considered trespass, not rape," McLaurin states, "and an owner could hardly be charged with trespassing upon his own property."

Within antebellum slavery rape and sexual exploitation was not peripheral; nor were the perpetrators and victims abnormal or rare. Rather, the culture of normalized violence that pervaded antebellum society was strongly tied to ideas of sexuality. Historian Edward Baptist asserts that white control over slaves and white men's rape of slave women cannot be separated: "to them, one act symbolized another, together in a cloud of buying, selling, raping, and consuming." In this way, sexual exploitation of slave women may have marked the ultimate form of control sought by the slave regime: to dominate each and every aspect of a human body rendered as property. "The rape of slave women by white men," writes historian Victoria Bynum, "marked the distinct convergence of racial, sexual, and economic systems."

Whether the abuse of slave women involved whipping, beating or maiming, such acts were both accepted and normal parts of antebellum culture, rooted in the exploitation of both slave labor and reproduction. In this heavily patriarchal and race-based social order slave women were placed at the bottom rung of the hierarchy. No matter the age, or color, whether house servant or field laborer, the brutality of slavery was an ever present reality and threat for slave women, who faced the daily possibility of abuse, maiming, sexual exploitation or even death at the hands of their owners and other authorities. It is not surprising that ex-slave Malindy Maxwell, when speaking of how her parents' master abused his white wife, used the treatment of black women as a fitting comparison to show the level of debasement in his actions. She said that her master "beat her, his wife, like he beat a n*gger [sic] woman."

But of course, as with any case of oppression, there were those who resisted--meeting violence, with violence of their own.

Next: Part II: Violent Women: Gender and Slave Resistance in the Antebellum South