My Mother Was Much of a Woman": Black Women, Work, and the Family under Slavery (original) (raw)

Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves

Words of fire: An anthology of African-American …, 1995

The paucity of literature on the black woman is outrageous on its face. But we must also contend with the fact that too many of these rare studies must claim as their signal achievement the reinforcement of fictitious cliches. They have given credence to grossly ...

Black Women’s Political Labor An Introduction

2018

Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, widely lauded as a foundational Black feminist text, speaks to Black women’s self-definition and self-actualization in the face of the interlocking and multiple forms of oppressions they confront in their daily lives. The novel foregrounds a number of recurring symbols and motifs that communicate this larger theme of Black women’s self-actualization, including, for instance, the protagonist Janie Crawford’s hair, which serves as a symbol and site of bodily and community control, and the mule. At the beginning of the novel, Nanny, Janie’s grandmother, expounds on the complexity of racegender politics that (some) Black women encounter. In her counsel to her granddaughter, Nanny states:

Slavery and women

Slavery not only impacted the black woman, but also the white mistresses. Through the writings of each of the authors mentioned there are numerous accounts of the detrimental effect that slavery had upon the women exposed and how it changed them emotionally. This essay will examine those various perspectives as well as research the backgrounds and intentions of the authors.

Gender Differences in Slave Characters: a Feminist Critique of Toni Morrison's Beloved and Narrative of the Life of Frederic Douglass, an American Slave

The focus of this study is to analyse gender differences between male and female slaves in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Frederic Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederic Douglass, an American Slave. There are many studies that have been carried out on slavery in Americas but few have focused on the different roles played by men and women slaves. This study interrogates gender differences between male and female slaves in American slavery. Using selected strands of the feminist theory, it analyses the differences in gender roles between male and female slaves in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Frederick Douglass' Narrative of Life of Frederic Douglass, an American Slave. The study is a comprehensive qualitative library research that will proceed via close reading of primary, secondary texts and refereed journal articles.

Female and Unfree in America: Captivity and Slave Narratives

Romanian Journal of English Studies, 2020

This study analyses two seminal American memoirs that depict female captivity: A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) by Mary Rowlandson and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). My aim is to discuss, using the tools of Critical Race Theory, the intersections of gender and race, focusing on how the two women’s femininity, as well as their individuality, is linked to Christianity and motherhood.

The Aftereffects of Slavery: A Black Feminist Genealogy

Meridians: Feminisms, Race, Transnationalism, 2018

The relationship of the enslaved past to the present has been an ongoing topic within African Diaspora studies generally, and within Black feminist studies specifically. This essay traces a black feminist genealogy rooted in Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007) and her essay "Venus in Two Acts" (2008). These are arguably two of the most influential works of scholarship in African American feminist studies of the past decade. Hartman’s attempt to use the archive to rescue those lost within, particularly girls and women, is a project also taken up in the three texts discussed here: Tina Campt’s Listening to Images (2017), Michelle D. Commander’s Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (2017), and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016). One of Hartman’s most important contributions is in juxtaposing the absences of the enslaved in the archive with the very real and present repercussions of what she calls the “after effects” of slavery on contemporary Black people, such as being subject to state violence. Hartman's extraordinary work carries its own after effects in its influence on the writing of contemporary scholars of the Black diaspora. Campt, Commander, and Sharpe amplify her claim of the importance of the enslaved past to understanding contemporary Black lives.