by bell hooks
body parts to male physicians. A French visitor to America observed, “American women divide their whole body in two parts; from the top to the waist is the stomach; from there to the foot is ankles.” On this same subject Page Smith comments:
They were too modest to let a doctor touch their bodies and they could not even bring themselves, in some instances, to describe an ailment, like one young mother with an ulcerated breast who, too prudish to speak frankly to the doctor, described her condition as a pain in the stomach.
Forcing white women to deny their physical beings was as much an expression of male hatred of woman as was regarding them as sex objects. Idealization of white women did not change the basic contempt white men felt towards them. Visitors from foreign countries often noticed the veiled hostility of white men towards white women. One visitor commented:
American men accorded their women more deference, lavished more money on them, regarded them with more respect than was accorded the women of any country. But they did not particularly like them. They did not enjoy their company; they did not find them interesting in themselves. They valued them as wives and mothers, they sentimentalized over them; they congratulated themselves on their enlightened attitude toward them. But they did not (and they do not) particularly like them.
The shift away from the image of white woman as sinful and sexual to that of white woman as virtuous lady occurred at the same time as mass sexual exploitation of enslaved black women—just as the rigid sexual morality of Victorian England created a society in which the extolling of woman as mother and helpmeet occurred at the same time as the formation of a mass underworld of prostitution. As American white men idealized white womanhood, they sexually assaulted and brutalized black women. Racism was by no means the sole cause of many cruel and sadistic acts of violence perpetrated by white men against enslaved black women. The deep hatred of woman that had been embedded in the white colonizer’s psyche by patriarchal ideology and anti-woman religious teachings both motivated and sanctioned white male brutality against black women. At the onset of their arrival in the American colonies, black women and men faced a society that was eager to impose upon the displaced African the identity of “sexual savage.” As white colonizers adopted a self-righteous sexual morality for themselves, they even more eagerly labeled black people sexual heathens. Since woman was designated as the originator of sexual sin, black women were naturally seen as the embodiment of female evil and sexual lust. They were labeled jezebels and sexual temptresses and accused of leading white men away from spiritual purity into sin. One white politician urged that blacks be sent back to Africa so that white men would not fornicate or commit adultery. His words were “remove this temptation from us.” Although religious white women, white men, and black men argued that white men were morally responsible for sexual assaults on black women, they tended to accept the notion that men succumb to female sexual temptation. Because sexist religious doctrines had taught them that women were the seducers of men, they believed black women were not totally blameless. Frequently, they used the term “prostitution” to refer to the buying and selling of black women for sexually exploitative purposes. Since prostitutes are women and men who engage in sexual behavior for money or pay of some kind, it is a term inaccurately used when applied to enslaved black women who rarely received compensation for the use of their bodies as sexual latrines. Abolitionist women and men labeled black women “prostitutes” because they were trapped by the language of the Victorian ethos. In speaking of the mass sexual abuse of black women, noted black orator Frederick Douglass told an abolitionist audience in Rochester, New York in 1850 that “every slaveholder is the legalized keeper of a house of ill-fame.” Yet his words did not begin to accurately describe the sexual exploitation of black women. Douglass informed his audience:
I hold myself ready to prove that more than a million of women, in the Southern States of this Union, are, by laws of the land, and through no fault of their own, consigned to a life of revolting prostitution; that by those laws, in many of the States, if a woman, in defense of her own innocence, shall lift her hand against the brutal aggressor, she may be lawfully put to death... It is also known that slave women, who are nearly white, are sold in those markets, at prices which proclaim, trumpet-tongued, the accursed purposes by which they are to be devoted. Youth and elegance, beauty and innocence, are exposed for sale upon the auction block; while villainous monsters stand around, with pockets lined with gold, gazing with lustful eyes upon their prospective victims.
It was difficult for abolitionists to discuss the rape of black women for fear of offending audiences, so they concentrated on the theme of prostitution. But the use of the word prostitution to describe mass sexual exploitation of enslaved black women by white men not only deflected attention away from the prevalence of forced sexual assault, it lent further credibility to the myth that black females were inherently wanton and therefore responsible for rape.
Contemporary sexist scholars minimize the impact of sexual exploitation of black women on the black female psyche and argue that white men used the rape of black women to further emasculate black men. Black sociologist Robert Staples asserts:
The rape of the slave woman brought home to the slave man his inability to protect his woman. Once his masculinization was undermined in this respect, he would begin to experience profound doubts about his power even to break the chains of bondge.
Staples’ argument is based on the assumption that enslaved black men felt responsible for all black women and were demoralized because of their inability to act as protectors—an assumption that has not been substantiated by historical evidence. An examination of many traditional African societies’ attitudes toward women reveals that African men were not taught to see themselves as the protectors of all women. They were taught to assume responsibility for the particular women of their tribe or community. The socialization of African men to see themselves as the “owners” of all black women and to regard them as property they should protect occurred after the long years of slavery and as the result of bonding on the basis of color rather than shared tribal connection or language. Prior to their adoption of white American sexist attitudes toward women, there was no reason for enslaved African men to feel responsible for all enslaved African women. Assuredly, the sexual assault of black women had an impact on the psyches of black male slaves. It is likely that the black male slave did not feel demoralized or de-humanized because “his” women were being raped, but that he did feel terrorized by the knowledge that white men who were willing to brutalize and victimize black women and girls (who represented no great threat to their authority), might easily have no qualms about totally annihilating black men. Most black male slaves stood quietly by as white masters sexually assaulted and brutalized black women and were not compelled to act as protectors. Their first instincts were toward self-preservation. In her slave narrative, Linda Brent tells readers that black male slaves as a group did not see themselves as the protectors of black slave women. She comments:
There are some who strive to protect wives and daughters from the insults of their master; but those who have such sentiments have advantages above the general mass of slaves... Some poor creatures have been so brutalized by the lash that they will sneak out of the house to give their masters free access to their wives and daughters.
Throughout the years of slavery, individual black men rallied to the defense of black women who were important to them. Their defense of these women was not motivated by a sense of themselves as the natural protectors of all black women.
Historian Eugene Genovese discusses the sexual exploitation of enslaved black females in Roll, Jordan, Roll, and contends:
Rape meant, by definition, rape of white women, for no such crime as rape of a black woman existed at law. Even when a black man sexually attacked a black woman, he could only be punished by his master; no way existed to bring him to trial or to convict him if so brought.
The rape of black
women by black male slaves is further indication that, rather than assuming the role of protector, black men imitated the white male’s behavior. Genovese concludes:
Some drivers forced the slave woman in much the same way as did some masters and overseers. It remains an open question which of those powerful white and black males forced the female slaves more often. Under the task system the driver set the day’s work for each slave and had no trouble making a woman’s lot miserable if she refused him. Under the more prevalent gang system, drivers could lay the whip on with impunity—if they had the power to whip at all—as many did—or they could find any number of other ways to reward and punish.
Given the barbaric nature of slave life, it is likely that black slave women allied with powerful black men who could protect them from the unwanted sexual advances of other slaves. Sexual jealousies and rivalries were a primary cause of most quarrels between black slave men.
The enslaved black woman could not look to any group of men, white or black, to protect her against sexual exploitation. Often in desperation, slave women attempted to enlist the aid of white mistresses, but these attempts usually failed. Some mistresses responded to the distress of female slaves by persecuting and tormenting them. Others encouraged the use of black women as sex objects because it allowed them respite from unwanted sexual advances. In rare cases, white mistresses who were reluctant to see sons marry and leave home purchased black maids to be sexual playmates for them. Those white women who deplored the sexual exploitation of slave women were usually reluctant to involve themselves with a slave’s plight for fear of jeopardizing their own position in the domestic household. Most white women regarded black women who were the objects of their husbands’ sexual assaults with hostility and rage. Having been taught by religious teachings that women were inherently sexual temptresses, mistresses often believed that the enslaved black woman was the culprit and their husbands the innocent victims. In Once A Slave, a book which contains a condensed body of information gleaned from slave narratives, the author Stanley Feldstein recounts an incident in which a white mistress returned home unexpectedly from an outing, opened the doors of her dressing room, and discovered her husband raping a thirteen year old slave girl. She
responded by beating the girl and locking her in a smokehouse. The girl was whipped daily for several weeks. When older slaves pleaded on the child’s behalf and dared to suggest that the white master was to blame, the mistress simply replied, “She’ll know better in future. After I’ve done with her, she’ll never do the like again through ignorance.” White women held black slave women responsible for rape because they had been socialized by 19th century sexual morality to regard woman as sexual temptress. This same sexual morality was adopted by slaves. Fellow slaves often pitied the lot of sexually exploited females but did not see them as blameless victims. One female abolitionist states:
Of all who drooped and withered under the inflictions of this horrible system, the greatest sufferer was defenseless women. For the male slave, however brutally treated, there was some recourse; but for the woman slave there was neither protection nor pity.
Rape was not the only method used to terrorize and de-humanize black women. Sadistic floggings of naked black women were another method employed to strip the female slave of dignity. In the Victorian world, where white women were religiously covering every body part, black women were daily stripped of their clothing and publicly whipped. Slave-owners were well aware that it added to the degradation and humiliation of female slaves for them to be forced to appear naked before male whippers and onlookers. A Kentucky slave recalled:
The women are subjected to these punishments as rigorously as the men—not even pregnancy exempts them; in that case before binding them to the stake, a hole is made in the ground to accommodate the enlarged form of the victim.
Susan Boggs recalled:
They would have a woman stripped and cobbed if she did anything they didn’t like. Perhaps if the bread did not rise well, the mistress would tell the master when he came home; and she would be sent to the trader’s jail to be cobbed. It is awful to think of women, of human beings, being exposed in this way.
Sadistic floggings of nude black women were socially sanctioned because they were seen as racial abuse, a master punishing a recalcitrant slave, but they were also expressions of male contempt and hatred for the female. Solomon Bradley, an ex-slave, told a journalist who interviewed him:
Yes, sir; the most shocking thing that I have seen was on the plantation of Mr. Farrarby, on the line of the railroad. I went up to his house one morning from my work for drinking water, and heard a woman screaming awfully. On going up to the fence and looking over I saw a woman stretched out, face downwards, on the ground her hands and feet being fastened to stakes. Mr. Farrarby was standing over her and striking her with a leather trace belonging to his carriage harness. As he struck her the flesh of her back and legs were raised in welts and ridges by the force of blows. Sometimes when the poor thing cried too loud from the pain Farrarby would kick her in the mouth. After he exhausted himself whipping her he sent to his house for sealing wax and a lighted candle and, melting the wax, dropped it upon the woman’s lacerated back. He then got a riding whip and, standing over the woman, picked off the hardened wax by switching at it. Mr. Farrarby’s grown daughters were looking at this from a window of the house through the blinds. This punishment was so terrible that I was induced to ask what offence the woman had committed and was told by her fellow servants that her only crime was in burning the edges of the waffles that she had cooked for breakfast
It takes little imagination to comprehend the significance of one oppressed black woman being brutally tortured while the more privileged white women look passively at her plight. Incidents of this nature exposed to white women the cruelty of their husbands, fathers, and brothers and served as a warning of what might be their fate should they not maintain a passive stance. Surely, it must have occurred to white women that were enslaved black women not available to bear the brunt of such intense anti-women male aggression, they themselves might have been the victims. In most slaveholding homes, white women played as active a role in physical assaults of black women as did white men. While white women rarely physically assaulted black male slaves, they tortured and persecuted black
females. Their alliance with white men on the common ground of racism enabled them to ignore the anti-woman impulse that also motivated attacks on black women.
Breeding was another socially legitimized method of sexually exploiting black women. I mentioned earlier that white men in colonial America defined the primary function of all women to be that of breeding workers. Contemporary scholars often dismiss the breeding of slave women on the basis that it occurred on such a small scale as to not merit attention. Yet a rather convincing body of evidence exists substantiating not only the existence of slave breeding but the fact that it was a widespread and common practice. Reporting on the slave trade in the state of Virginia in 1819 Frances Corbin wrote, “Our principal profit depends on the increase of our slaves.” During the early years of slavery, breeding of African women was a difficult process. In traditional African communities black women suckled their children at their breasts and weaned them at the late age of two years old. For this time period, the African woman did not engage in sexual intercourse and consequently spaced her pregnancies. This practice allowed women time to recuperate physically before starting a new pregnancy. White slaveowners could not understand the reasons slave women did not bear many children consecutively. Their response to this situation was to use threats of violence as a means of coercing slave women to reproduce. Frederick Olmstead, a southern white observer of the practice of slave breeding, made this comment:
In the states of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, as much attention is paid to the breeding and growth of negroes as to that of horses and mules. Further south, we raise them both for use and for market. Planters command their girls and women
(married or unmarried) to have children; and I have known a great many girls to be sold off because they did not have children. A breeding woman is worth from one-sixth to one-fourth more than one that does not breed.
Advertisements announcing the sale of black female slaves used the terms “breeding slaves,” “child-bearing woman,” “breeding period,” “too old to breed,” to describe individual women. Moncure Conway, the son of a Virginia slaveholder, recalled:
As a general thing, the chief pecuniary resource in the border states is the breeding of slaves; and I grieve to say that there is too much ground for the charges that general licentiousness among the slaves for the purpose of a large increase is compelled by some masters and encouraged by many. The period of maternity is hastened, the average youth of negro mothers being nearly three years earlier than that of any free race, and an old maid is utterly known among the women.
Slave women who refused to choose a man and mate with him had men forced upon them by their overseer or master. Some slaveholders preferred to breed black women with white men, as mulattoes frequently brought a higher price on the market or were easier to sell. In a letter dated March 13,1835 a Methodist minister residing in Virginia observed:
Mulattoes are surer than pure negroes. Hence planters have no objection to any white man or boy having free intercourse with all the females; and it has been the case that an overseer has been encouraged to make the whole posse his harem and has been paid for the issue.
Barren black women suffered most under the breeding system. In a report presented to the General Anti-Slavery Convention held in London June 1840, witnesses testified that barren black females were the victims of great physical and psychological abuse. The report stated:
