Slave And Mistress: Ideologies Of Womanhood Under Slavery By Hazel Carby Analysis

In Hazel Carby’s critical essay, Slave and Mistress: Ideologies of Womanhood under Slavery, she begins by establishing her intent to specifically explore the antebellum period of the south, its effects on the public perception of the black woman in America, and especially public perception/ideologies of the black woman that stem from the mythical, the “cultural creation,” of the black woman, created by white population (Carby 20). She further establishes that this will involve investigating how “white Southern womanhood,” affected and influenced “black womanhood,” and essentially created two different spheres of sexuality and motherhood for white and black antebellum women (Carby 20). In the manner in which slave narratives work to subvert the practices and stereotypes of slavery, this essay will integrate black female narratives to show how “black women, as writers, addressed, used, transformed, and on occasion, subverted the dominant ideological codes,” especially the cult of true womanhood (Carby 20-21). Subsequently come the basics of historiography: to understand the past of the American black …show more content…
If women had all of these traits, they were “true” women, and could all the power of someone following the status quo. Quotes from several feminist historians support the notion that this “cult” had a deep influence on cultural perception of women. However, virtues women were expected to have varied drastically from the reality of antebellum white women’s lives contrasted with the image of the perfect woman. In building a historiography of antebellum women, true womanhood as an ideology and as a “definer of what constituted a woman and womanhood,” is more relevant than the reality of womanhood (Carby