American Slavery Literature Review

Slavery produced an American society in the British southeastern colonies in the late 17th century that enhanced the patriarchal ideology and stripped away any agency from the enslaved African and Anglo women. The lack of social status between both of these women must be compared and contrasted using the concepts such as women’s sexual behavior, women’s productive and reproductive work, and women’s right over children, to grasp the idea of how each group lost their power. Anglo women lost their social agency because of the British involvement with slavery, and the enslaved African women lost their agency through slavery. Civilization in the British colonies at that time period was reforming itself, society was trying to restructure itself to …show more content…
Winthrop Jordan explains, Anglo women were the “repositories of white civilization” (Jordan, pg. 100). The foundation was that where there was a mother, there was a civilization. This meant, in a society where the social construction was racial purity and racial separation, the role of an Anglo woman was to be productive and reproductive any way the enslaved African women was not. The Anglo woman “served principally an ornamentive function, for everything resembling work was done by Negro slaves” (Jordan, pg. 100). Judith A. Carney, in her literature “The African Women Who Preceded Uncle Ben: Black Rice in Carolina, explains the role of the enslaved African women through the concept their controlled productivity and their limited ability to reproduce. In contrast to Anglo women, the enslaved African women faced physical methods of productivity. For Anglo women, their proof of a “job well done” meant baring children and raising them to continue the English culture. For enslaved women, productivity was seen through their ability to harvest and grow crops properly. Rice was brought over to the British colonies by African women because in their homeland, it was their job to be in charge of the rice harvest. However, once on American soil, the plantation owners took the crop away from traditional enslaved African women hands. Carney says, “Slaves with knowledge of growing rice had to submit to the ultimate irony of seeing their traditional agriculture emerge as the first food commodity traded across oceans” (Carney, pg. 96). The owners made any slave, male or female, be a part of the rice harvesting process. A role which was meant for women, which gave them a purpose was now stripped away from them. Along with productivity, comes being able to reproduce; however, the rice crop was such hard labor that reproducing was not a likelihood