US History Live!
Primary Reading Sources
Week 4

Slave Women's Lives

The cruelty suffered by slaves was not limited to physical violence at the hands of slaveholders and overseers, though such violence was certainly widespread. The psychological deprivations caused by the institution of slavery could, over a period of time, be every bit as injurious to blacks as physical punishment. Particularly victimized were slave women, whose plight is described in this excerpt from Jacqueline Jones's study of the history of black women in America.

…A compact, volatile, and somewhat isolated society, the slaveholder’s estate represented, in microcosm, a larger drama in which physical force combined with the coercion embedded in the region's political economy to sustain the power of whites over blacks and men over women....As blacks, slave women were exploited for their skills and physical strength in the production of staple crops; as women, they performed a reproductive function vital to individual slaveholders’ financial interests and to the inherently expansive system of slavery in general. Yet slave women’s unfulfilled dreams for their children helped to inspire resistance against "the ruling race" and its attempts to subordinate the integrity of black family life to its own economic and political interests...

…The master took a...crudely opportunistic approach toward the labor of slave women, revealing the interaction (and at times conflict) between notions of women qua "equal" black workers and women qua unequal reproducers; hence a slaveowner just as "naturally" put his bondswomen to work chopping cotton as washing, ironing, or cooking....

However, slave women also worked on behalf of their own families, and herein lies a central irony in the history of their labor. Under slavery, blacks’ attempts to sustain their family life amounted to a political act of protest against the callousness of owners…

SOURCE: Jacqueline Jones. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. 11-15, 19, 22, 28. Copyright © 1985 by Basic Books, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.