The relationships between masters and slave women

Résumé du document

I chose to deal with the relationships between the white masters and the black slave women during the slavery era in the United States first because it interests me a lot. Talking about it in class made me eager to dig deep into it and learn more. The slavery period is for me a moving topic. When we think about it, we often picture a black skinny and shackled man in our mind. And it is true that men were assigned to very hard labour in the fields and were often very badly treated. Black women were often doing housework, but it was as hard for them as it was for men outside, and maybe even worse. Indeed, I already know that women were submitted to a pain that was beyond the unbearable physical pain, they were submitted to psychological pain. During slavery, black slave women were separated from their children and husbands, were doomed by the law to spread an enslaved race, and were frequently sexually abused by the master and gave birth to his children.

Extraits

[...] Very unexpectedly, it has been more difficult to find journal articles about the relationships between slave women and masters. I did found one very interesting article, but it is not focused on this relationship. It actually deals with the forms of auto-birth control that slave women were using. But we can relate it quite easily to the subject, since if their relationship with their master had been healthy and fearless, and if above all they had been free, they would probably not have had to resort to these birth control methods. [...]

[...] White people did also a lot to hush up a number of disturbing things like rapes or illegitimate children. My findings led me to really relate slavery to the African- American people today. At the beginning, I tended to think it was something of the past and to be forgotten, but now I figured out how it is part of their history, as painful as it can be. Interbreeding of slave women and white masters allowed most of the contemporary generation of Black people in the United States to exist. [...]

[...] But of course, in this kind of relationship between a master and a slave woman, the mistress often gets jealous very fast, and takes any opportunity to lessen the girl in the man's eyes. Thus, slave women were caught in the crossfire: between serving a master who was returning support and being assailed by the mistress, or remaining retiring (in the background) and take the risk of being disliked by the master one who owns the whip. Sojourner was encouraged by her master about her good work. [...]

[...] Indeed, masters' rapes onto the black slaves were very frequent and often begot pale skin offspring. As it was a constant reminder of the unfaithful husband for the mastress, the slave woman was often tortured and even killed with the “object of her crime” (her baby). In her narrative, Harriet Jacobs also talks about “happy women, [ ] who have been free to chose the object of your affection” (290). Indeed, a slave woman could almost not even choose her lover. [...]

[...] New York: Norton & Company 280-315. Perrin, Liese M. “Resisting Reproduction: Reconsidering Slave Contraception in the Old South.” Journal of American Studies. Aug. 2001: 255-274. Cambridge University Press. . [...]