Book Review on "Deborah Gray White's AR'n't I A Woman"

Book Review 6 pages (1844 words) Sources: 1

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I a Woman: Female Perspectives in the Plantation South, is an ominously disturbing read simply because of its subject matter. The author chooses to detail the intimacies of the lot of female slaves during the chattel slavery period in the United States. As such, the licentiously depraved behavior of slave traders and slave masters is uncovered and elucidated from the perspective of the slaves who had to bear such disgusting actions the most. To her credit, White has researched a fair amount of first-person narratives that reveals that contrary to the writings of numerous historians prior to her narrative, those slaves were women, not men.

White's 167-page manuscript is stratified into six different chapters, each of which chronicles a different aspect of the life of a slave woman. The author explores the history of and the convenient myths that such loathsome slave masters and traders propagated to engage in their immoral acts of sexual violence against such women. She also elucidates the economic responsibilities of slave women, which was more multi-faceted than those of their male counterparts. One of the more interesting chapters in this work unveils the relationships and the hierarchy of those relationships that were formed between women -- which were largely due to their limitations as the property of others. Yet throughout the entire book the author contextualizes the fate and the nature of African-American slave women as contrasted to that of women in general at this time in the U.S. (which primarily consisted of Caucasian women), as well as to African-American slave men and to Caucasians in general.

The author's stance in analyzing these myriad perspectives which are all related to African-American slave women in the southern portion of the U.S. is definitely academic. White holds a doctorate degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is a professor at the University of Rutgers in New Jersey. As such, her manuscript is bereft of emotional appeals and only concentrates on the facts regarding female slaves. The author chose this subject due to the negligence of prior historians who only chronicled the lives of slaves as an interchangeable mass, and gave little attention to conceptions of gender and how it may have affected the institution of chattel slavery prior to the Civil War. As the author explains, most historians only described African-American slaves via the mythology of little Sambo -- essentially as innocuous creatures who were incapable of any true harm or good, both to themselves or to others -- and sets the theme of her book in alignment with an "emphasis of recent literature on slavery" that "has been…negating Samboism" (White, 1985, p. 22).

In order to dispel this myth and the others that were previously mentioned, the author concentrates the bulk of her research on first-hand material that helps to elucidate various aspects of the life an African-American slave women. Of particular usage in helping her overcome the dearth of historical accountings of female slaves were the records kept of interviews conducted by the Works Progress Administration. Although this program was created in the century after the dissolution of chattel slavery in the U.S. And played a fundamental role in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal activities, the author states its interviews conducted on this subject "remain one of the few sources that present the unfiltered perspective and voice of slave women" (p. 24). Additional sources White's research was based on include correspondence from slave owners, various publications such as newspapers, as well as accounts from Civil War soldiers, travelers, and government documentation of census information. The sources allow the author to get a comprehensive perspective that is well informed about the contours of slavery specifically for women.

One of the primary focal points of White's work seems to be to shatter the mythology that slave owners readily perpetuated about their female slaves. White takes care to assess the history of three different mythologies which, purported in chronological order, include that of the female slave as a Jezebel, the quintessential Mammy and finally as the Sapphire. The mythology of African-American slaves as these different images was crucial to the success of the slave trade, for it allowed rakish slave traders to justify their ruthless exploitation of these women as objects, readily forsaking their humanity. The first of these myths, that all African and African-American women were sexually promiscuous whores, has its foundations in basic African traditions and necessities of performing slave labor, especially in the field. Due to differences in climate, culture, and ways of life, it was common for African women to bare parts of their bodies in their native environment that Caucasian women, in colder climates and in different civilizations which required a different set of daily responsibilities would not. Caucasian men, then, interpreted this custom on the part of African women as a sign of an overt, insatiable sexual appetite, which was further fueled by slave women (again, in the exceedingly hot climate of the rural south) laboring in the fields with less regards for their clothing than the beatings of their masters. As such, images of raised skirts and other instances of less than fully clothed women were used to perpetuate he mythology that these women were simply gluttons for sex.

More importantly, this myth of slave women as lascivious sexual beings was important for business. By choosing to solely focus on the supposed overt sexuality of these women, slave owners were able to encourage as much reproduction as possible with them. Chattel slavery in America was actually built not on the backs of slaves laboring, but inside the bellies of slave women who reproduced. The benefits to the slave master of the reproductive prowess of African and African-American women were ideal. Their babies meant that the slave master could increase his pool of slaves -- at no additional cost. (It is noteworthy to mention that actually purchasing a slave was expensive in the 17th and 18th centuries). Thus by portraying and viewing slave women as insatiable Jezebels, the slave master could increase his economic prowess by producing more slaves at no cost and have the ultimate benefit -- he could also have as much sex with these women as possible. Sex and money has rarely gone together as beneficially as it did for slave owners with this erroneous, insidious myth of the slave women as Jezebels.

Whereas slave women's sexuality was exploited by masters whether or not they were raping these women or encouraging sexual activity with their mates, White's manuscript reveals that pressure from northern abolitionists caused the myth of slave women to morph into that of the Mammy image, immortalized in likeness of Aunt Jemima products. The mythology of the mammy portrayed slaves as non-sexual, extremely innocuous, good-natured, and a key component to the administrative activities of organizing plantation life. 'Mammies' made excellent house slaves, loved the children of their master's more so than their own, were trustworthy, and responsible for fulfilling all of the domestic work that proper Caucasian wives found disdainful. By transforming the mythology of slave women from Jezebels to mammies, slave owners could justify slavery as a righteous institution, perhaps even mutually beneficial, by describing the ideal relationship they had with their 'loving' mammies.

Prior to discussing the emergence of the Sapphire myth which occurred near the end of chattel slavery and continued well throughout the remainder of the 19th century, White shifts her focus to the responsibilities and the economic value of female slaves. As previously denoted within this document, such women were expected to labor in the fields, while others (particularly those whose mothers had been raped by lewd slave owners) became house slaves and ideal mammies. From a point of sheer economics, then, the slave woman was more valuable than her male counterpart. Not only could she perform the same work as him, but she could perform work that he could not -- such as certain domestic duties that mammies were responsible for and which directly involved the clothing and needs of the slave master's wife. Additionally, slave women were expected to organize, clean, and perform domestic duties around the slave quarters. Thus, even when they were not being worked to exhaustion and death in the immoderate southern heat, they were expected to go into their quarters and continue working -- all the while they were getting raped (by slave owners), beaten, and courted for sex and marriage by their male counterparts.

A crucial point in the author's manuscript is that the dual purposes that the slave woman served helped to isolate her from all of her contemporaries -- but herself. She could never be considered as virtuous or worthy as her Caucasian women counterparts due to the low esteem for her sex and the wanton raping and beating she continually incurred. This part of the slave woman's life was exacerbated by the fact that her slave husband and male counterparts were relatively unable to stop the slave owner from effecting this treatment on her and… READ MORE

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