The Role Of Enslaved Women In The Anebellum Period

During the antebellum period, many enslaved women were (legally) property and fertility machines, statuses that shaped their identities as mothers and a women. However, there were many avenues for them to break out of the mold of captivity. Enslaved women were able to preserve their human dignity through resistance in the form of their sexuality, manipulating the power structure in the master’s household and their own will to live. This gave them a sense of independence from being property, and allowed them to be human beings, African American women.
Enslaved women in the antebellum south had variety of responsibilities to attend to which shaped their role as women. Women’s roles ranged from working in the fields, picking cotton pregnant or …show more content…
As a house maid, enslaved women lives were still limited to the authority of the masters which controlled most of their lives, even at times, their bodies. While midwives were required to deliver the babies, all enslaved women were forced to bear viable children. They were viewed as fertility machines that generated more property and assets to their masters. The role of breeder was often degrading and viewed as rape. According to H&T “women were…forced to have sexual intercourse… the legal and moral definition of rape.” Most enslaved women were shown to submit and were subject to have children with their slave master and other slaves on demand, which showed how much their owners could, in fact, own every part of a …show more content…
Enslaved women viewed these acts of sexual labor as complete ownership which some defined violently or passively. The ability for these enslaved women to resist advances made by their slave master showed their ability to maintain their autonomy as women. According to H&T, resistance from sexual work was as enslaved woman saying “you do not own this – not this part of me.” Some other women thought that they “rather be dead than a slave.” The means of resistance were in the form of abortion and often suicide. In one case, an enslaved woman by the name of Margaret Garner. She found freedom from bondage of her slave master by death for herself and her children. Levi Coffin, from the Cincinnati Commercial newspaper reported that “Garner, seeing that their hopes of freedom were vain, seized a butcher knife that lay on the table and with one stroke cut the throat of her little daughter… she then attempted to take the life of the other children and to kill herself.” These acts of infanticide and attempted suicide were viewed as defiant means to accepting the life of slavery. Women found freedom in the ability to live or die that was out of the slave owner’s hands, regaining their autonomy. H&T remarks that “the part of a slave woman to terminate her pregnancy was one