2.22 - Gender and Resistance in Slave Narratives
Sexual Violence and Enslaved Women's Resistance
Enslaved African American women faced a danger the law refused to even recognize. Laws against rape did not apply to them, so an enslaver who assaulted a woman he held in bondage faced no legal consequences. And because a child's status followed the mother's under partus sequitur ventrem (see 2.8), every child born to an enslaved woman was enslaved too, which meant enslavers profited from enslaved women's bodies well beyond their labor.
Some enslaved women resisted sexual abuse, and the enslavement of their children, in several ways:
- Fighting back: Some women physically fought their attackers, even though striking an enslaver could bring brutal punishment.
- Controlling pregnancy: Some used plants as abortion-inducing drugs, refusing to bear children into slavery.
- Infanticide: In the most desperate cases, some mothers took their own children's lives rather than see them grow up enslaved. In 1856, Margaret Garner, cornered by slave catchers after escaping from Kentucky to Ohio, killed her young daughter rather than let her be returned to slavery.
- Running away with their children: When it was possible, women escaped with their children, even though fleeing with children was far harder and riskier than fleeing alone.
How Gender Shaped the Slave Narrative
Slave narratives were firsthand accounts by formerly enslaved people. They described suffering under slavery, methods of escape, and how the authors managed to learn to read and write, and they emphasized the full humanity of enslaved people in order to advance the political cause of abolition.
But men and women told these stories differently, shaped by nineteenth-century gender norms. Narratives by enslaved men emphasized autonomy and manhood. Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative, for example, builds toward his fight with Edward Covey, a farmer known for "breaking" enslaved people, which Douglass introduces with the line "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man."
Narratives by formerly enslaved women focused instead on domestic life, modesty, family, and their constant vulnerability to sexual violence and exploitation. This created a real dilemma. The same ideals of female purity that readers expected also made it risky for a woman to tell the truth about sexual abuse, since readers might judge her rather than her abuser. Harriet Jacobs handled this by publishing under the pseudonym "Linda Brent," changing the names of the people in her story, and speaking directly to her readers to explain choices she knew some of them would condemn.
Black Women's Narratives and Political Movements
In both the United States and the Caribbean, Black women's accounts of their distinct experiences under slavery advanced the causes of abolition and of the feminist movements in their societies.
Mary Prince was born enslaved in Bermuda around 1788 and was later enslaved in the salt ponds of Turks Island and in Antigua. In 1828, her enslavers, John Wood and his wife, brought her to London. There she was able to leave their household, but going home to her husband in Antigua would have meant being enslaved again. She dictated her story to Susanna Strickland, and Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, published it in 1831. It was so popular that three editions were printed that year, as the British campaign against slavery pushed toward the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.
Harriet Jacobs was born enslaved in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813. To escape years of sexual harassment by her enslaver, Dr. James Norcom (called Dr. Flint in her book), and in hopes he would give up his hold on her children, she hid in a tiny crawlspace in her grandmother's house from 1835 to 1842, then escaped north by boat. With encouragement from Amy Post, a Quaker abolitionist and women's rights activist in Rochester, New York, and editing help from the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, Jacobs published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in 1861. It is usually called the first slave narrative written by a formerly enslaved African American woman herself (earlier women's narratives, like Sojourner Truth's in 1850, were dictated to someone else). In her preface, Jacobs stated her goal plainly: she wanted "to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage." That appeal to women as women is a big part of why her book mattered to both abolitionists and women's rights activists.
Required Sources
Excerpt from The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave by Mary Prince, 1831
In her History, Prince describes an enslaver, called only Mr. D., who forced her to wash him while he stood naked, and the day she finally fought back after he beat her, a clear example of the resistance to sexual abuse described above. Near the end of her story, Prince speaks directly to English readers, saying she tells her story "to let English people know the truth," and insists that enslaved people want freedom at a time when defenders of slavery claimed they were content. The narrative shows how a Black woman's account of her own experience fed the British abolition movement.
[...] He had an ugly fashion of stripping himself quite naked, and ordering me then to wash him in a tub of water. This was worse to me than all the licks. Sometimes when he called me to wash him I would not come, my eyes were so full of shame. He would then come to beat me. One time I had plates and knives in my hand, and I dropped both plates and knives, and some of the plates were broken. He struck me so severely for this, that at last I defended myself, for I thought it was high time to do so. [...]
[...] This is slavery. I tell it, to let English people know the truth; and I hope they will never leave off to pray God, and call loud to the great King of England, till all the poor blacks be given free, and slavery done up for evermore.
Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Related by Herself (1831, third edition), pp. 13 and 23. Source: Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Excerpts from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself by Harriet A. Jacobs, 1860 (Sections V to VIII, XIV, and XXI)
Jacobs's book (dated 1860 and published in Boston in early 1861) follows her life from girlhood to freedom. In Chapter V, "The Trials of Girlhood," a young teenage Jacobs describes Dr. Flint's harassment and the total absence of legal protection for enslaved girls, the same reality described at the top of this page. Chapters VI to VIII show Mrs. Flint's jealousy, Dr. Flint's refusal to let Jacobs marry the free Black carpenter she loved, and the lies enslavers told about life in the North. In Chapter XIV, "Another Link to Life," the birth of her daughter leads to the book's clearest statement about gender and slavery: slavery is terrible for men, but "far more terrible for women." In Chapter XXI, "The Loophole of Retreat," she describes the cramped crawlspace where she hid for nearly seven years, a form of resistance driven by her determination to protect her children. Together, these sections show the themes of women's narratives (family, modesty, and vulnerability to sexual violence) and why Jacobs's book advanced both abolition and women's rights.
V. The Trials of Girlhood. [...] He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things. My soul revolted against the mean tyranny. But where could I turn for protection? No matter whether the slave girl be as black as ebony or as fair as her mistress. In either case, there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men. [...]
VIII. What Slaves Are Taught to Think of the North. Slaveholders pride themselves upon being honorable men; but if you were to hear the enormous lies they tell their slaves, you would have small respect for their veracity. [...]
XIV. Another Link to Life. [...] When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own. [...]
XXI. The Loophole of Retreat. [...] The garret was only nine feet long, and seven wide. The highest part was three feet high, and sloped down abruptly to the loose board floor. There was no admission for either light or air. [...] I suffered for air even more than for light. But I was not comfortless. I heard the voices of my children. [...]
Harriet A. Jacobs (published as Linda Brent), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself (1861), Chapters V, VIII, XIV, and XXI, pp. 45, 67, 119, and 173. Source: Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill