Women, Race & Class

Davis chronicles the reality of Black women’s lives during slavery and its lasting impact on them long after slavery was abolished. Although the 19th century saw a redefining of femininity to center around women’s roles as mothers, wives, and housekeepers, these notions of femininity only applied to white women. Black women were not seen as feminine or fragile because, like their male counterparts, they were seen as chattel: a source of unpaid labor who were primarily field workers. Additionally, after the abolition of the international slave trade, slavemasters relied heavily on enslaved women’s reproductive capacity to replenish their slave labor force. Motherhood, however, did not afford Black women any better treatment because the “[i]deological exaltation of motherhood” that applied to white women “did not extend to slaves” (7). Even pregnant or nursing women were expected to provide labor at the same levels as others; Davis cites one slave narrative describing how women suffering from being unable to breastfeed were “beat[en] […] with raw hide, so that the blood and milk flew mingled from their breasts” (9). To slaveowners, Black women were just breeders, not mothers. In effect, Davis argues, enslaved women became “genderless as far as the slaveholders were concerned” (5), and within the system of slavery, “Black women bore the terrible burden of equality in oppression” (19).