!@ Ar N t I A Woman Female Slaves in the Plantation South

In her Ar'n't I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985), Deborah Gray White primarily challenges and corrects John W. Blassingame's singular focus on male slaves and masculinity, which was a product of the African-American males' Men's Rights Movement, so to speak. White is also adding to historiographical debates begun by Stanley Elkins, who says slavery made Africans into submissive, child-like individuals; Kenneth M. Stampp, who denies slaves had culture; and Eugene D. Genovese, who focuses on culture but uses the theory of paternalism focusing on slavery as a relationship based on consensus. Ultimately, however, all of these works serve as revisionist histories of U.B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery.



White's monograph is also the byproduct of the Civil Rights Movement and of the Women's Rights Movement. Although a precise date for the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement is impossible, it was clearly in progress with the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. This movement awakened the attention of historians and the public to recognize and study the agency and equality of black Americans. Prior to the late 1960s and 1970s, all women, black or white, were generally excluded from the historian's scrutiny; therefore, it is not exceptional that it took until 1985 for enslaved African women to truly receive scholarly attention. Furthermore, whether consciously or unconsciously, these then contemporary events influenced White's choice of a topic, if only because of the new attention these minorities received. White was the first scholar to truly study enslaved black women.



Although their responsibilities were different, African-American women, like men, were slaves in the American South during the colonial and antebellum period. These women, like their male counterparts, were all individuals who were neither singularly submissive, caring, and/or sexual, nor superhuman as the "Jezebel" and "Mammy" stereotypes/archetypes disseminate. Female slaves did face a "double oppression" due to the combination of their race and sex (23). They also had dual responsibilities working for their masters and for their families. White primarily focuses on the antebellum period, but she also briefly covers emancipation and the re-enslavement of African-Americans after the Civil War. White argues on the assumption that female slaves experienced a different slavery than men and had different responsibilities.



"The Nature of Female Slavery" is White's most effective chapter because it truly addresses her concerns in writing this book. It recognizes women as individuals with agency. It specifically looks at women as slaves. This chapter focuses on disease, violence, resistance, and childbirth in the lives of slave women. In other chapters, information tends to be somewhat disorganized and redundant at times. Perhaps an organization by themes such as resistance, mothers, fields, etc. would help improve this. White's focus does not stay singularly on women and their experiences. Overall, White's monograph reads more like a series of articles.



White accomplishes a great deal in Ar'n't I a Woman, but she also leaves more than enough room for future historians to expand the scholarship of African-American female slavery. White concentrates on women who lived and worked on cotton plantations. Rice, indigo, tobacco, sugar, and hemp, for example, were also grown in the South by slaves. Foodstuffs such as rice have a prerequisite for gang labor and allow less free time, thus allowing male and female slaves less time to cultivate relationships, bare children, and transmit culture. By focusing on one type of plantation and generalizing that experience, White homogenizes the experience of women, probably often leading to a better picture than reality allows. In order to truly understand slavery the individual differences that comprise these individual women need recognition. Ar'n't I a Woman also neglects, like other works, to shed light on the true and multiple horrors of slavery. Readers are not left with an impression of slavery's brutality. Sexual exploitation by whites is discussed, but the complexity and consequences of it are not discussed. In some ways, White does not contribute completely new and original information as much as she re-conceptualizes and re-phrases the story of women found in earlier scholarship. Ar'n't I a Woman seems to have been written before the sources were readily available that would enable this to be a more unified, sophisticated, and comprehensive analysis. WPA interviews were heavily relied upon due to the lack of sources revealing the female slave experience. Ar'n't I a Woman is important and should continue to be read because it is a first in the field of slavery.


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