Deborah Gray White - Arnt I a woman?: female slaves in the plantation South

For my mother,
Eddie Florence Gray

Throughout the course of this project I have been fortunate to have met and been helped by many people who thought a book on slave women was needed and could be done. Among the first were my fellow graduate students at the University of Illinois at Chicago, especially Stephen Hansen, Arnold Hirsch, and Jacqueline Petersen. My dissertation advisor, Robert Remini, was always encouraging and helpful, as were the other members of my dissertation committee, particularly Daniel Scott Smith and Marilyn Miller. Several of my colleagues in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee read and commented on the dissertation and first drafts of the book manuscript. I thank Margo Conk, Reginald Horseman, and Carole Shammas for the time and the effort they put into it. Special thanks are extended to Margo Conk, who for six years never stopped pushing me to finish this work and who was always so confident that things would work out. I also benefited from the seminars held in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. My colleagues Osei-Mensah Aborampah, Lloyd Barbee, Nana Korsah, Richard Lewis, Frank Martin, and Winston Van Horne made useful and insightful comments on several chapters of the manuscript. Milton Cantor and Catherine Clinton read earlier drafts and I am indebted to them for their comments. A special note of thanks is extended to Anne Firor Scott, who read the dissertation and the manuscript. Her comments were invaluable and her encouragement even more so. I would also like to thank Jacqueline Hall and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese for comments made on articles that I have written. Many of their thoughtful suggestions are incorporated here, as are those of my editor, Robert Kehoe. I have benefited just as much from the kind word as from kind criticism. For the former I thank Darlene Hine, Blanche Hersh, James Oakes, Harold Rose, and Walter Weare. I am indebted to The American Association of University Women and The Southern Fellowship Foundation for providing funds for the research and writing of this book, and to Marie Mayer, Jessica Myers, and Ilga Strazdins for typing it over and over again.

To my friends outside of the university world and to my family I extend deep feelings of gratitude. Many thanks to Melanie James for her patient assistance with the final editing and galleys. Heather Crooks, Charlene Griffin-Jordon, and Clara Rogers-Green probably do not know how much I was bouyed by their enthusiastic words of support. Had it not been for the child-care and homemaker help of my mother, Eddie Florence Gray, my mother-in-law, Lodilleen Iona White, and Jean Parker and her family, this book would have taken even longer to produce. My daughters, Maya and Asha, were an inspiration for the book and I hope that when they get older they will be inspired by it. I thank my mother and father for the support they have given me through the years and also Patrick White for being my own private resource center and a wellspring of compassion and wisdom.

History is supposed to give people a sense of identity, a feeling for who they were, who they are, and how far they have come. It should act as a springboard for the future. One hopes that it will do this for black women, who have been given more myth than history. The myths have put black women in a position where they most, as Sojourner Truth did in 1858, prove their womanhood. Despite all that she has come through and accomplished, the American black woman is still waiting for an affirmative answer to the plaintive question asked over a century ago: Arnt I a woman?

THIRTEEN YEARS AGO I ended Arnt I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South with the above statement. At that time the Civil Rights and Black Power movements had spawned a renaissance in African-American Studies. Books on every aspect of black life were in demand, and, as outlined in the Arnt I a Woman? introduction, an abundance of books on slavery attempted to restore to black men the masculinity Americans had denied them. Yet, African-American women were close to invisible in historical writing.

Not because there was no need or audience for black womens history. Rather, black women were invisible because few historians saw them as important contributors to Americas social, economic, or political development, and few publishers

I gladly report that on this, the eve of the twenty-first century, things have changed. New source material on black women has been unearthed and historians are using it in inventive ways. History books on African-American women have multiplied and a new language now expresses the difference between black men and women, and black women and white people. We now understand that race, class, gender, sexuality, and other identity variables do not exist independently. Nor do they compete for supremacy, but reinforce, overlap, and intersect each other. The history of black womens enslavement has filled out. We know far more today than in 1985 about womens resistance, religion, medical care, and sexual and labor exploitation. We know that colonial white Americas perceptions of racial difference were founded on the different way they constructed black and white women. A body of writing now allows us to determine the legacy of the black womans enslavement; we understand how slavery impacted on her postbellum employment history, migration, selfimage, and on her involvement in the family and the nineteenthand twentieth-century movements for political and civil rights. In fact, unlike in 1985, there is now more history than myth. This history indeed gives black women a greater sense of themselves, but it is not clear that it has liberated them from the task of proving their womanhood. Aspects of the mythologys dismantling have been disquieting. Most unsettling perhaps is the documented revelation that Sojourner Truth did not stand before the 1851 Akron, Ohio, Womans Rights convention and ask the penetrating question Arnt I a Woman?

If I were writing Arn t I a Woman? today I would still use that discredited speech as theoretical grounding, but I would also use the significant body of new work on difference and black female consciousness.

These statements presume that racism and sexism can be added to produce a prejudice more severe than either racism or sexism alone. In fact, black women did not experience sexism the same way white women did. Owing to their color white men saw black women differently and exploited them differently. Race changed the experience of black womanhood. The rape of black women, their endless toil, the denial of their beauty, the inattention to their pregnancy, the sale of their children were simultaneous manifestations of racism and sexism, not an extreme form of one or the other. For black women, race and sex cannot be separated. We cannot consider who black women are as black people without considering their sex, nor can we consider who they are as women without considering their race.

Similarly, white women endured their own race-determined sexism. The silence and submissiveness demanded of them, their exile to the home and from schools, their inability to own property rested on a notion of femininity that made piety, delicacy, morality, weakness, and dependency the reserve of white women alone.

Black and white womanhood were interdependent. They played off one another. The white womans sense of herself as a womanher self-esteem and perceived superioritydepended on the racism that debased black women. White women were mistresses because black women were slaves. White women had real power over enslaved women because black women were really powerless. Black and white women had so little in common because the sexism they both experienced kept them apart.