21 - Black Women in the Early Americas

Summary

For many years, regardless of their ethnicity and nationality, their age, and their religious preference, women featured scarcely at all in most scholarly accounts of the transatlantic slave trade and the evolving slave systems of the early modern Americas. All too often, the false impression was conveyed to readers as well as to other audiences that this was a trade, and that these were systems, that principally involved either men or sexless and genderless objects, the “slave” and the “slave owner.” When Black women did make what was often a fleeting appearance, then they did so usually in the context of motherhood and the slave family, occasionally in discussions of workplaces and religious cultures, but seldom if ever in the context of resistance and rebellion. Moreover, virtually no attention was paid to the ways in which they interacted either with one another or with those women who were also marginalized in the scholarship: underclass women and those white women who, usually through widowhood, acquired slaves – women who held other women, as well as men, in perpetual bondage.

More often than not, then, when they were to be found, Black women were homogenized and stereotyped in traditional scholarship as being essentially powerless victims, as helpless subjects of their masters' and overseers' sexual whims and fantasies, as abject beings who lived in worlds in which and over which they exercised little or no personal agency.