Customer Reviews

Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South

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Debra Gray White has really done a fine job on this piece, she really tells the whole story of what slavery (Being a Black woman) is about. What I really liked about the author was that she wasn't one sided in writing her piece. She didn't totally demonize the white race, She just told what happened. She talks about how Black women are totally ignored when remeniscing about the act of slavery. I really liked her talk of Jezebel, Sambo, and Mammy as steroetype for Black women. After reading her piece I know see that black women were almost in a worse baot that men in the early years of the country. She talks about the things black women face like sexual harrasment they couldn't do anything about (Women were properties). She talks about a black woman (Mammy) raises a white kid, for the white kid to grow up to become a drunkered and blow off her head with a shotgun. One slaveowner said he'd rather "whip a slave woman than eat on an empty stomach". This novel really shows the intensity of negation black women faced.

I read this book recently for a college history class. Most interesting was the first chapter on the sterotypes of 'Jezebel' and 'Mammy'. Many works have focused on the stereotypes of male bondsmen, such as Sambo or the Nat Turner personalities, however few other works have focused on the misrepresented bondwomen. This gap in history is particullary because there seems to be a limited amount primary sources of the bondwoman's unique struggle to protect her children, herself from her master,mistress, and to assert herself as a women in a system that tended to androynize women. White tries to infer and collect as mnay relavent sources as possible.

In the book Ar'n't I a Woman?, by Deborah Gray White, the reader is challenged by the author to set previous notions regarding American slave women aside to understand the truth, which has long been elusive to the majority of Americans. Over the course of the work, White shocks and appalls the reader in an attempt to inform her readers about the horrors and injustices that slave women were forced to deal with on a regular basis. In doing so, the author makes her point abundantly clear and leaves little question as to the authenticity of her research and work.

White begins her work quite firmly. She discusses two of the great myths of female slavery: Jezebel and Mammy. The author promptly exposes the lie that slave women were promiscuous, dirty women with an unquenchable lust for white men. She asserts, "The choice put before many slave women was between miscegenation and the worst experiences that slavery had to offer. Not surprisingly, many chose the former" (34). As a result, the act of the slave woman giving in to the sexual advances of her white owner branded her as unchaste, a Jezebel. The second stereotype discussed is that of mammy, the nurturing black woman who cares for the white children. Both of these stereotypes are important to note, not only because of their historical significance and their supreme effect on Caucasian beliefs, but also because White ties these ideas through the rest of her work.

After successfully debunking the myths regarding female slaves in America in the first chapter, White goes into great depth regarding the actual lives and hardships that slave women faced daily. For example, White paints a portrait of the female slave that depicts her as just as hard working, if not moreso, than her male counterparts. However, though her work in the fields was important, her true value was placed in keeping the male slaves sexually satisfied and reproducing new generations of slaves. As a result, most female slaves had families, though more disconnected than those of the American whites. The main reason for slave marriages, according to the author, was "to add to the comfort, happiness, and health of those entering upon it" (99). Indeed, even the supposedly sacred act of marriage was not off limits to Caucasian exploitation. As a result, the female slave trade did not highlight the hard-working nature of the slave, but rather her physical attractiveness, for the benefit of both the male slave and the slave owner. While all slaves were considered products, female slaves in particular were, quite literally, viewed as little more than sexual objects. This stigma did not immediately escape the black woman at emancipation either. White states, "From emancipation through more than two-thirds of the twentieth century, no Southern white male was convicted of raping or attempting to rape a black woman. Yet the crime was widespread" (188). Due to these injustices, the American people are too often subjected to an inaccurate portrait of the female slave and her female descendants, and therefore miss out on a truly inspiring individual.

In her work, Deborah Gray White tears apart the common misconceptions of female slaves and depicts a person that is loving, family-oriented, and hard-working. However, the book, though relatively brief in length can be a tedious read at times. Though White validates her assertions with just a few sources and anecdotes, she relentlessly re-asserts with numerous additional examples which come across as both unnecessary and excessive. As a result, Ar'n't I a Woman at times seems distractingly repetitive for the majority of its pages. In addition, the book could also present itself as an overtly feminist text, which has the potential to turn off many of today's readers of both genders. Though White places some of the blame for conditions and roles of slave women on Caucasian females, she undoubtedly places the majority of the blame on white men. However, it perhaps would have been more accurate and beneficial for her to blame Southern, and American, society as a whole, as Caucasian men were just a product of a long-standing tradition. Despite these obstacles, however, White cannot be discredited for her tireless pursuit to uncover the truth and discredit the myths that have haunted African-American women for centuries. Indeed, if she has accomplished anything, it is the true emancipation of America's most discriminated class.

February Is Black History Month. March Is Women's History Month

I have mentioned more than once in this space, dedicated as it is to looking at material from American history and culture that may not be well-known or covered in the traditional canon, that the last couple of scholarly generations have done a great deal to enhance our knowledge of American micro-history. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the study of American slavery and its effects on subsequent history for the society and for the former slaves. The book under review represents one such effort in bringing the previously muddled and incomplete story of the triply-oppressed black women (race, gender and class) to the surface.

As the author, Deborah Gray White, has pointed out in her introduction the general subject of the American slave trade, its place in the culture and the general effects of plantation life on the slave has been covered rather fully since the 1950's and 1960's. However, she set as her task filling the gap left by the mainly male historians (Elkins, Genovese, Apteker,et. al) who tended to treat the plantation slave population as an undifferentiated mass. Ms. Gray White undertook to correct that situation with this 1985 initial attempt to amplify the historical record. Although other, later researches have expanded this field (as a sub-set of women's history, at the very least) this is definitely the place to start. I might add that copious footnotes and bibliography give plenty of ammunition for any argument that the female slave has been under-appreciated, under-studied and misunderstood within the context of the historical dispute of the effects of slavery on the structure of the black family and black cultural life.

Ms. Gray White set up a five pronged attack on the then current (up to 1985) conceptions about the role of the female slave: the always `hot button' and continuing controversy over her role as sexual "Jezebel" or asexual "Mother Earth" nurturing Mammy: her central economic role in the upkeep of the plantation and of the slave quarters: her critical role as "breeder" of children in order to maintain the laboring population and slave-owners' profits; her relationship to other females on the plantation and the division of labor among them by age, child-bearing status and health; and, the myths or misconceptions about black families, marriage and culture.

As part of Ms. Gray White's argument she has addressed the thorny issue of the female slave as a sexual object (to both white and black men) on the one hand and her critical role of 'nurturer' to the next generation of slaves on the other. This is a tension that in many ways has not been resolved even in post-slavery times and so was worthy of her attention (and ours today, as well). Moreover, this ambivalence flows over into the kinds of work the female slave was expected to perform at various stages of her life as a "breeder" and the differential treatment she received by the slave-owners at various stages of that cycle. Ms. Gray White also has some interesting things to say about female social solidarity (and rivalries) in the workplace and in the cabins. The age old question of social hierarchy between "house" and "field" slaves also gets her close attention.

Additionally, Ms. Gray covers a then relatively new topic (brought about by male historian's conception of the female slave as dominating the family structure and therefore producing the stereotypical "Sapphire"). Although she has not provided any really new information about the economic and social structure of plantation life (which drove Southern society in the ante-bellum period in everything from national politics to "correct" racial attitudes among non-slave-owning whites) her great achievement is to give voice to the differences between male and female slaves that had not been previously appreciated.

Perhaps the most important scholarly achievement in this little book however is her challenge to the orthodoxy about the female dominance of black family life on the plantation and its effects on post-slavery life. This additional `hot-button' issue gets fully outlined here. To seek further insight in this issue today look at other sources to see how the arguments have continued not only as a question of historical importance but national social policy.

Female slaves played a greatly influential role as mothers, wives, and workers. Yet the vast majority were illiterate and had no Boswells to document their lives and emotions. The literature of slavery and slave culture grew by leaps and bounds in the Civil Rights Era, but the female slave perspective continued to be underappreciated. It was not until the 1980s that female slaves began to be examined as critical historical actors.

In Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, Deborah Gray White ably guides us through the world of slave women and girls, revealing how their lives on the plantation were similar and different from those of their male counterparts. As this pioneering work demonstrates, black females were remarkable in that they experienced a cruel form of sexual equality: they endured the same unjust treatment dealt to slave men while still living with the challenges peculiar to womanhood.

For White, there is no better spokeswoman for this bitter irony than Sojourner Truth. She uses the former slave and abolitionist's iconic (and now discredited), rhetorical question as the title and theme of her book. The first edition, coming on the heels of the women's liberation movement, argued that "[t]he slave woman's condition was just an extreme case of what women as a group experienced in America." Yet female slaves, according to White, endured three times the oppression of other women: "Black in a white society, slave in a free society, woman in a society ruled by men, female slaves had the least formal power and were perhaps the most vulnerable group of antebellum America." White sought to demonstrate how women suffered through their degradation yet also constructed their own, informal powers and networks.

New scholarship on slavery and gender prompted White to modify these assertions in the 1999 edition. "For black women," she writes, "race and sex cannot be separated." Much of the new material in the later edition extends her underdeveloped notion that slave and freed females endured a unique brand of sexism that was tied to their race. For instance, White unflinchingly describes the "trail of violence" that Union soldiers meted out to black women during the invasion and occupation of the South. She also argues that "enslaved" is a more apt characterization than "slave" because it indicates that "African and African-American women were not born degraded but rendered so by enslavement." This new emphasis on overt and insidious cruelty was probably inspired by critics of the first edition, such as Juliet E. K. Walker, who believed that Ar'n't I a Woman? "obscures the brutality" of slavery by emphasizing the agency of female slaves.

White was hampered by a lack of reliable primary source material, and this rendered her vulnerable to charges of cherry-picking and reckless inference. The same tactics of "silence and secrecy" that slave women used in dealing with whites make it especially difficult to recreate their lives. "It is unfortunate," White admits, "but so much of what we would like to know about slave women can never be known because they masked their thoughts and personalities in order to protect valued parts of their lives from white and male invasion." White was forced to rely on what was virtually the only extensive source of female slave narratives, the interviews with former slaves conducted by the Works Project Administration in the 1930s. She strenuously defends this dependence on the memories of octogenarians by calling them "a less problematic source than plantation records," since these were written by white men and therefore hopelessly unreliable. Although White characterizes this lack of female slave accounts as another instance of the oppression that was peculiar to the group, the reader is left wondering whether her arguments rest on a strong foundation. In the newer edition she happily describes the veritable flood of new material which became available between 1985 and 1999 but only incorporates it in the new preface and concluding chapter.

Ar'n't I a Woman? is too specific and too broad all at once. The title indicates that the book deals with the struggles of female slaves throughout the whole period of the Southern slave society. Yet the narrative, despite a brief treatment of the Middle Passage, is almost exclusively tied to the antebellum era. There are almost no references to slave life in the colonial and Early Republican periods, and the Civil War and emancipation are ignored until the last chapter. The book also gives an impression of the plantation South as being a homogenous, cotton-producing region. As far back as 1918 and U. B. Phillips' American Negro Slavery (and probably earlier) historians have been aware of the different conditions that prevailed on cotton, rice, tobacco, and sugar plantations.

White possibly pushes too far in her modified characterization of slaves as the "enslaved." This new interpretation, she asserts, "forces us to remember that black men and women were Africans and African-Americans before they were forced into slavery ..." In fact, few of the slaves chronicled by White were born in Africa or experienced freedom before 1863. Additionally, for those who were born and lived their lives as slaves, it was not a "new ... identity assigned to them" only by white masters, but a defining aspect of their lives. The reader of Ar'n't I a Woman? is left wondering whether female slaves are ultimately unknowable. Yet despite some problems of sources and interpretation, Deborah Gray White's short book is a diligent effort to uncover female slave life, and it has a value out of all proportion to its size.

She did an amazing job!!! There so little resources about African American women's history on the plantation and the research she found and how she used it was impeccable! Definitely a keeper!

This book gives a very insightful look into the role of Afircan American women during and after slavery. It allows the reader to view the slave woman in a different light. It helped me to understand the importance of womanhood. When learning America history, I never truley understood the role of African American women during slavery. I thought that all they did was work and reproduce. This book has taught me that through the hardship and adversary the black woman is like who she is today, the glue that holds it together. After all of what they had been through, the slave woman was still hopefull and was still beneficial to herself and society.

In her Ar'n't I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985), Deborah Gray White primarily challenges and corrects John W. Blassingame's singular focus on male slaves and masculinity, which was a product of the African-American males' Men's Rights Movement, so to speak. White is also adding to historiographical debates begun by Stanley Elkins, who says slavery made Africans into submissive, child-like individuals; Kenneth M. Stampp, who denies slaves had culture; and Eugene D. Genovese, who focuses on culture but uses the theory of paternalism focusing on slavery as a relationship based on consensus. Ultimately, however, all of these works serve as revisionist histories of U.B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery.

White's monograph is also the byproduct of the Civil Rights Movement and of the Women's Rights Movement. Although a precise date for the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement is impossible, it was clearly in progress with the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. This movement awakened the attention of historians and the public to recognize and study the agency and equality of black Americans. Prior to the late 1960s and 1970s, all women, black or white, were generally excluded from the historian's scrutiny; therefore, it is not exceptional that it took until 1985 for enslaved African women to truly receive scholarly attention. Furthermore, whether consciously or unconsciously, these then contemporary events influenced White's choice of a topic, if only because of the new attention these minorities received. White was the first scholar to truly study enslaved black women.

Although their responsibilities were different, African-American women, like men, were slaves in the American South during the colonial and antebellum period. These women, like their male counterparts, were all individuals who were neither singularly submissive, caring, and/or sexual, nor superhuman as the "Jezebel" and "Mammy" stereotypes/archetypes disseminate. Female slaves did face a "double oppression" due to the combination of their race and sex (23). They also had dual responsibilities working for their masters and for their families. White primarily focuses on the antebellum period, but she also briefly covers emancipation and the re-enslavement of African-Americans after the Civil War. White argues on the assumption that female slaves experienced a different slavery than men and had different responsibilities.

"The Nature of Female Slavery" is White's most effective chapter because it truly addresses her concerns in writing this book. It recognizes women as individuals with agency. It specifically looks at women as slaves. This chapter focuses on disease, violence, resistance, and childbirth in the lives of slave women. In other chapters, information tends to be somewhat disorganized and redundant at times. Perhaps an organization by themes such as resistance, mothers, fields, etc. would help improve this. White's focus does not stay singularly on women and their experiences. Overall, White's monograph reads more like a series of articles.

White accomplishes a great deal in Ar'n't I a Woman, but she also leaves more than enough room for future historians to expand the scholarship of African-American female slavery. White concentrates on women who lived and worked on cotton plantations. Rice, indigo, tobacco, sugar, and hemp, for example, were also grown in the South by slaves. Foodstuffs such as rice have a prerequisite for gang labor and allow less free time, thus allowing male and female slaves less time to cultivate relationships, bare children, and transmit culture. By focusing on one type of plantation and generalizing that experience, White homogenizes the experience of women, probably often leading to a better picture than reality allows. In order to truly understand slavery the individual differences that comprise these individual women need recognition. Ar'n't I a Woman also neglects, like other works, to shed light on the true and multiple horrors of slavery. Readers are not left with an impression of slavery's brutality. Sexual exploitation by whites is discussed, but the complexity and consequences of it are not discussed. In some ways, White does not contribute completely new and original information as much as she re-conceptualizes and re-phrases the story of women found in earlier scholarship. Ar'n't I a Woman seems to have been written before the sources were readily available that would enable this to be a more unified, sophisticated, and comprehensive analysis. WPA interviews were heavily relied upon due to the lack of sources revealing the female slave experience. Ar'n't I a Woman is important and should continue to be read because it is a first in the field of slavery.

In reading this book for an assignment for a history class, I took to heart what the women went thru during the slavery days. You got the feeling of being there with them and feeling their pain. Ms. White has done an excellent job in bring out what really went on with women during slavery.

Deborah Gray White writes tellingly about the double evils faced by the Black woman of the old South: racism and sexism. Truly, they faced a lack of personhood at every turn.

The author weaves together quotes from enslaved Black women to tell her story. As other reviewers have noted, there does tend to be something of a feel of a feminist slant to the writing. I certainly would not argue against her basic premise of White male abuse of Black female slaves. However, having researched the White female slave owners, I would contend that women of the South were as guilty as the men of evil and condoning evil.

Reading firsthand accounts of these Black "sisters of the spirit" is the only way to truly gain a feel for what they endured and the larger cultural evils. Three examples include: "Behind the Scenes," "The House of Bondage," and "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl."

Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction , Spiritual Friends, and Soul Physicians.