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"Us Colored Women Had to Go Though A Plenty": Sexual Exploitation of African-American Slave Women
Abstract
Thelma Jennings is Professor Emeritus of American History at Middle Tennessee State University and author of The Nashville Convention: Southern Movement for Unity, 1848-1850. She is currently working on a book-length study of the African-American bondwomen's perception of the slave experience.
1. George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960, orig. pub. 1859), 18; C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chestnut's Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 168; Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1985), 28-46. White discusses the Jezebel image of black women. For other analyses of the Jezebel complex see: Bell Hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 52; Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981) 176-77; Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in While America: A Documentary History (New York: Random House, 1972), 163-64; Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 150-51; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 292; Mary Frances Berry and John W. Blassingame, Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 115-16. Chancellor William Harper, "Harper's Memoir on Slavery," De Bow's Review of the Southern and Western States, 1850 (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1967), 499; Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Back Country, 1853-1854 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970, orig. pub. 1860), 153. For a discussion of slave illegitimacy, see Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Random House, Inc., 1976), 73-75, 78-79.
2. Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. by L. Maria Child (New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1973, orig. pub. 1861), 79.
3. Anne Firor Scott, Making the Invisible Woman Visible (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 178.
4. George P. Rawick, ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 41 vols., Series 1, Supplement Series 1 and 2 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972, 1977, 1979); Charles L. Perdue, Jr., Thomas E. Borden, and Robert K. Phillips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976); John B. Cade, "Out of the Mouths of Ex-Slaves," Journal of Negro History 20 (July 1935): 294-337.
Restriction to female ex-slaves was based on the desire to let the women speak for themselves. To my knowledge, no one has done a study on slave women using primarily the female narratives as primary source material, although Deborah Gray White relied heavily on WPA interviews with female ex-slaves in her recent work. Ar'n't I a Woman?. On p. 24 White notes, "I found them the richest, indeed almost the only black female source dealing with female slavery."
The idea for age restriction originated with Norman Yetman, Life Under the "Peculiar Institution": Selections from the Slave Narrative Collection (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1970), 5. As Yetman points out, the quality of the narratives of older ex-slaves is generally better than those of younger ones. My primary reason for age restriction is that interviews of older ex-slaves are based to a much greater extent on first-hand experience. Sometimes an interviewee's age is not given; in such a case, content of the narrative had to provide a basis for judgement. In this category, a few narratives had to be eliminated because of poor quality—brevity, senility of interviewee, and so on. Likewise, two interviewees who were age eleven in 1865 were included because of the exceptional quality of the narratives.
For a discussion of how differences in sex and race of interviewer affected responses of the informants, see John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), lii.
5. The sample of twentieth-century...
... Five broad contexts provide support for our hypothesis that men's likelihood to rape increases when the perceived likelihood of discovery is low: (1) wartime rape (Brownmiller, 1975;Gottschall, 2004;Henry et al., 2004), (2) when men hold positions of power (Abbott, 2015;Eastham, 1979;Isely, 1997;Moniuszko & Kelly, 2017;Poggioli, 2019;Shupe et al., 2000), (3) sexual slavery such as sex-trafficking (Ahram, 2015;Gleason & Harris, 1976;Jennings, 1990;Walker-Rodriguez & Hill, 2011), (4) intoxication (Abbey & McDuffie, 1996;Lawyer et al., 2010;Mouilso et al., 2012), and (5) solo international travel (Kennedy & Flaherty, 2015). For deeper review of these contexts, see Hahnel-Peeters (forthcoming). ...
Research on men's sexual exploitation of women has documented that men's psychology tracks cues associated with the ease of women's exploitability. In the current studies, we examined a different class of cues hypothesized to aid men's use of sexually exploitative strategies: environmental cues to the likelihood of discovery. We defined likelihood of discovery as the perceived probability of identification when engaging in exploitative behavior (e.g., presence of others). We test the hypothesis that men's likelihood to rape increases when their perception of the likelihood of discovery is low in three studies. In Study 1, we conducted a content analysis of individuals’ responses ( N = 1,881) when asked what one would do if they could stop time or be invisible. Besides the “other” category whereby there were no specific category for nominated behaviors, the most nominated category included sexually exploitative behavior—representing 15.3% of reported behaviors. Both Studies 2 ( N = 672) and 3 ( N = 614) were preregistered manipulations of likelihood of discovery surreptitiously testing men's rape likelihood to rape across varying levels of discovery. We found men, compared to women, reported a statistically higher likelihood to rape in both Studies 2 and 3: 48% compared to 39.7% and 19% compared to 6.8%, respectively. Across Studies 2 and 3, we found no statistical effect of the likelihood of discovery on participants’ likelihood to rape. We discuss how the presence of one's peers may provide social protection against the costs of using an exploitative sexual strategy if a perpetrator is caught.
... For example, Black women were seen as property and, most importantly, as animals during enslavement. Their capacity to bear children under harsh conditions was exploited, and the women were often forced to mate and reproduce and sometimes raped by enslavers and their associates (Jennings, 1990). These oppressive reproductive methods were often coupled with narratives that Black women were promiscuous, sexual deviants, had a high pain tolerance, and were lazy. ...
Aim
To examine factors that influence intrapartum health outcomes among Black childbearing persons, including cisgender women, transmasculine and gender‐diverse birthing persons.
Background
Black childbearing persons are three to four times (243%) more likely to die while giving birth than any other racial/ethnic group. Black birthing persons are not just dying from complications but also from inequitable care from healthcare providers compared to their white counterparts.
Design
Discursive paper.
Method
Searching national literature published between 2010 and 2021 in PubMed, CINAHL, Embase and SCOPUS, we explored factors associated with poor intrapartum health outcomes among Black childbearing persons.
Discussion
Several studies have ruled out social determinants of health as sufficient causative factors for poor intrapartum health outcomes among Black birthing persons. Recent research has shown that discrimination by race heavily influences whether a birthing person dies while childbearing.
Conclusions
There is a historical context for obstetric medicine that includes harmful stereotypes, implicit bias and racism, all having a negative impact on intrapartum health outcomes. The existing health disparity among this population is endemic and requires close attention.
Impact on Nursing Practice
Nurses and other healthcare professionals must understand their role in establishing unbiased care that promotes respect for diversity, equity and inclusion.
No Patient or Public Contribution
There was no patient or public involvement in the design or drafting of this discursive paper.
... If bondwomen were noncompliant, they risked beatings, starvation, or rape. In a content analysis of interviews with 514 ex-slaves who were 12-or 13-years old at the time of emancipation, 205 (40%) made comments about sexual enslavement (Jennings, 1990). Thirty-six (18%) noted their masters were directly guilty of the perpetration. ...
The bodyguard hypothesis posits that women cultivate and use bodyguards to provide protection against sexual violence. Bodyguards are defined as individuals in social relationships with the target who provide protection by deterring would-be sexual assaulters, physically intervening during an attempted assault, or seeking revenge against a perpetrator to deter future assaults. Victims of sexual violence experience many costs including unwanted pregnancies by a man they have not chosen, contracting sexually transmitted infections, suffering psychological pain and physical damage, and circumvention of the woman's mate choice (reviewed in Buss, 2021). Due to these costs, women are hypothesized to have evolved psychological defenses against sexual violence (Buss, 2021). One hypothesized defense includes the cultivation and use of bodyguards.
... International law does not explicitly identify the reproductive exploitation of women as a possible outcome of the trafficking process, nor does the Palermo Protocol consider reproductive exploitation as a form of exploitation in trafficking. Some scholars view this omission as a male bias that tends to view slavery-like practices through the lens of men's experiences, ignoring the specific ways in which women experience exploitation (Bridgewater, 2005;Jennings, 1990). This research suggests that the reproductive exploitation of women may be the most severe aspect of their experience of trafficking. ...
This study contributes to the marriage trafficking literature by highlighting its demand, unique forms of exploitation, and conducive context through a qualitative study in China–Vietnam border areas. The findings indicate: (a) local demand for marriage constitutes a premise for the emergence and development of a marriage trafficking market, (b) three forms of exploitation distinguish marriage trafficking from other trafficking forms; (c) the local contexts conducive to the formation and facilitation of marriage trafficking also impede trafficked women's agency. In-depth interviews were conducted with marriage trafficked women who have not exited the trafficking situations, and with key local social network actors in the trafficking areas.
... Furthermore, recent genotype array studies reveal an over-representation of women of African descent than would otherwise be expected based on the slave ship manifests that documented the forcible transatlantic exile of 12 million Africans known as the Middle Passage 56,57 . This bias in the US gene pool toward women of African descent and European men can, in part, be attributed to the well-documented sexual exploitation of enslaved women by slave holders 58,59 and points to such exploitation as an accelerator of genetic admixture 54,60 . This sordid reality deflates any assertion that binary stratification based on the phenotypic presence of melanin alone, i.e., "the one drop rule" 61,62 has scientific validity. ...
... Marshall's review of the physical and psychological ailments of enslaved men and women reflect scholarly views prominent during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. These include attributing common illnesses afflicting the enslaved population specifically to West African ancestry rather than health disparities derived from maltreatment and violence, and observing that pregnant enslaved women were provided with the utmost of care, when in fact they were subject to physical punishment by overseers and brutal postnatal medical experimentation by plantation doctors [54][55]. Also, the falsehood that malingering or pretending to be ill was easily remedied through nonviolent means such as trickery, when in fact plantation owners and overseers would often use violence to "prove" someone falsely enacted an illness, even if the illness was legitimate [56]. ...
Health sciences librarianship has historically benefited from avoiding critical conversations around the role of race in the profession, reflected through a select few number of articles on the topic. The purpose of this study was to add to this body of literature and apply a critical librarianship framework on the early scholarly record of health sciences librarianship and the legacy of integration within the Medical Library Association (MLA). Three Southern medical works and the integration views of Mary Louise Marshall, the longest-serving president of MLA from 1941 to 1946, were thematically and textually analyzed to redress the profession’s long-standing legacy with Whiteness and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) representation. In reframing the historic past of MLA both through Marshall’s works and her views, the goal is to acknowledge ways in which the profession has impeded progress and present steps to remedy appropriate outreach for the future.
... One can easily make a connection between this practice and the historical sexual misuse of Black women precipitated by slavery. As Jennings (1990) notes, "female bondage [during slavery] was worse than male bondage because the female slave was both a woman and a slave in a patriarchial regime where males and females were unequal, whether white or black" (p. 45). ...
This paper examines the use of food to corporealize Black women’s subjectivity. Looking primarily at the lyrical content of select songs, the paper argues that the recurring use of the food motif as a metaphor for the Black female body represents an engagement in a politics of control through an act of consumption. This consumption is two-fold. First, at the macro level, it is mired in the ethos of capitalism where the female body in general is packaged for consumption and second, at the micro level, it is a form of dis-membering or silencing Black women’s voices.
... Further, Petersen (2009) concluded that differences within an ethnic group are more pronounced than between races [85]. 58 Age may be one of those intra-group differences, relating to medical-mistrust and healthcare-seeking behaviors. Overall, there are numerous and diverse causes that affect-health seeking behaviors in the Black-American population. ...
The health status for Black-Americans is worse than other ethnic groups due to less seeking of medical care. Many Black-Ameri-cans refuse to seek medical care due to their mistrust of the medical establishment. Cultural-mistrust, which perpetuates medical-mistrust, was used as the theoretical framework for this study. The purpose of this quantitative, hierarchical multiple-regression research was to investigate the foundations of medical-mistrust by the Black-American population, and elucidate its connection to the underutilization of healthcare services, resulting in inferior outcomes and overall increased healthcare costs and burden to society. The study was also intended to determine if age and medical-mistrust adversely affect healthcare utilization by Black-Americans when controlling for gender, income, insurance status, and education level, using the Medical Mistrust Index and Group-Based Medical Mistrust Scale as data collection tools. Results from 148 surveys collected from Black men (n = 57) and women (n = 91) in Orlando, Florida, USA revealed that there is a negative significant relationship between medical-mistrust and healthcare utilization (r =-.023) when controlling for gender, income, insurance status, and education level. Further, it was found that a non-significant bivariate relationship exists between age (r = .032) and healthcare utilization among Black-Americans [1,2]. However, this study's results indicate that Black-Americans of all age groups may harbor more distrust than mistrust of healthcare. Thus, this research adds further knowledge to medical-mistrust as a cause for decreased healthcare utilization by the Black-American population. It may also aid healthcare professionals with ways to decrease health disparities between Black-Americans and other ethnic-American groups, bringing about the necessary positive social change and medical assistance Black-Americans need to overcome the underutilization of healthcare services due to medical-mistrust. Nowhere in the medical profession is trust and mutual understanding more essential and consequential than in emergency medicine and critical care settings where immediate actions and confident decisions might mean the difference between life or death. Thus, emergency medicine and critical care personnel should be more cognizant and sensitive to the long-standing and persistent medical-mistrust embedded in the psyche of specific members of the Black-American population who may present for treatment or be guardians of those with an emergency or critical care condition.
... Abusive actions, such as using medical treatment without necessary anesthesia, encouraged science that would categorize the Black female body as abnormal (Bishop, 2018;DeGruy, 2005;Haley, 2013;Jennings, 1990). Linking race (i.e. ...
Historical trajectories of explicit disregard contribute to current day biases related to the health and well-being of Black women and girls. In the current study, a multi-faceted analysis is used to examine linkages between historical mistreatment, twenty-first-century health disparities and specific problems with quality of care, access to resources and a lack of regard for the personal agency of Black women and girls. Considering systemic biases, the author asserts six core components of intersectionality to guide six practical solutions for reducing sexual health disparities experienced by Black women and girls in America.
... In fact, "everything in US history is about the land -who oversaw and cultivated it, fished its waters, maintained its wildlife, who invaded and stole it; how it became a commodity ("real estate") broken into pieces to be bought and sold on the market" (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2015:8). Black women's health is inextricably tied to the settler colonialist state, based upon the US history of enslavement and the early medical practice of doctors examining enslaved Black women to assess the health and value for sale at slave auctions (Jennings, 1990). Black women's agency has been linked to the State since enslavement, during the period following the abolition of slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, where there were double standards for sexual violence and defensive acts for Black women vs. White women; and, today with the ongoing criminalisation of Black women's bodies and the cumulative stress contributing to the cardiometabolic syndrome. ...
The everyday lived experiences of Southern Black American women in the United States (US) are rarely explicitly characterised in Black Feminisms’ discourse. The lack of an active discourse surrounding the Southern Black women’s identity is a glaring weakness in the broader discussion of feminism (Rushing, 2009 Rushing W (2009) Memphis and the Paradox of Place: Globalization in the American South, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; 2017 Rushing W (2017) ‘No place for a feminist: Intersectionality and the problem South: SWS Presidential Address’, in Gender & Society, 31, 3, 293–309, doi.org/10.1177/0891243217701083[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). From Black women who historically worked as day workers, cleaning the homes of white families while their families fended for themselves, to the contemporary phenomena of home health care aid workers charged with cleaning and caring for individuals, often older and white, Southern Black women’s ways of knowing have framed not only the civil rights movement (Emmons et al, 2013 Emmons C, Goldstone DN, Decker S, Jones MD, Lovett BL., Dulaney MW, Myrick-Harris C, Morris TM, Frystak SL, Frear YD & Whayne JM (2013) Southern Black Women in the Modern Civil Rights Movement, US: Texas A & M University Press. [Google Scholar]); but also contemporary social movements such as #SayHerName and the agency of digital social phenomena such as Black Twitter. Past social movements emphasised space and the meaningfulness of the South concerning civil rights, yet current discourse fails to integrate region and location in the narrative of these movements, thus missing opportunities to explore the “complexity and explanatory power” place contributes (Rushing, 2017 Rushing W (2017) ‘No place for a feminist: Intersectionality and the problem South: SWS Presidential Address’, in Gender & Society, 31, 3, 293–309, doi.org/10.1177/0891243217701083[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]:1). The proliferation of digital platforms such as podcasts, videos, social media stories focused on health demonstrate how Black women are reclaiming their health, and bringing others along with them. However, the theorisation of what we term Southern Black Feminisms, specifically as it relates to Black women’s health, is lacking. This theoretical article, informed by qualitative and quantitative data from both authors’ previous research, will build a profile for Southern Black women in the US, characterise Southern Black Feminisms and propose a Southern Black woman informed, evidence-based framework addressing health inequities among Southern Black women. The goal is to demonstrate how the experiences of everyday Black women in the US South and the Global South are connected, especially with African Diasporic women, and consider how potential alliances can contribute to collective resistance and action.
... Of those narratives, 35 percent included women who either had fathers who were white men or had children with white fathers. 11 This "interracial sex" was most often forced and always coerced, due to the inherent power dynamic between a free white man and an enslaved black woman. The rape of enslaved women by white men is considered by historians to be "a routine feature of life on many, perhaps most, slaveholdings" 12 with "abundant evidence that many slave owners, sons of slave owners, and overseers … in effect raped the wives and daughters of slave families." ...
When Rape was Legal is the first book to solely focus on the widespread rape perpetrated against enslaved black women by white men in the United States. The routine practice of sexual violence against enslaved black women by white men, the motivations for this rape, and the legal context that enabled this violence are all explored and scrutinized. Enlightening analysis found that rape was not merely a result of sexual desire and opportunity, or simply a form of punishment and racial domination, but instead encompassed all of these dimensions as part of the identity of white masculinity. This provocative text highlights the significant role that white women played in enabling sexual violence against enslaved black women through a variety of responses and, at times, through their lack of response to the actions of the white men in their lives. Significantly, this book finds that sexual violence against enslaved black women was a widespread form of oppression used to perform white masculinity and reinforce an intersectional hierarchy. Additionally, white women played a vital role by enabling this sexual violence and perpetuating the subordination of themselves and those subordinate to them.
... As authorized in the court order dated September 29, 1952, I have made a neuropsychiatric examination of Ruby McCollum, and report that Ruby McCollum is not psychotic (not insane) at the present time. It is my opinion that she was not psychotic (not insane) at the time of the alleged offense [31][32][33][34][35][36]. I have been treating this patient for a nervous disorder classified as a psychoneurosis depressive and hypochondria being the predominating symptoms I treat this patient for a nervous disorder, and the name of the nervous disorder I said was psychoneurosis depression and hypochondria being the predominant symptoms. ...
In this chapter, I use trial transcripts, books, documentaries, and newspaper articles to examine the case of Ruby McCollum (a wealthy African American woman who spent two years in prison and 20 years in a mental institution for killing her rapist-Doctor Adams). Ruby McCollum is one of an incalculable number of African American women who were systematically raped during the totalitarian era of Jim Crow. Ruby McCollum’s story reveals vivid details about her experience with rape, physical and mental abuse, being drugged, and conceiving two children from her rapist. The Jim Crow south-similar to slavery was based on systemic racism that includes a broad range of attitudes, emotions, habits, actions, and racist ideologies supported by white-dominated social institutions and which Feagin calls the white racial frame. The white racial frame includes the attitudes and actions, stereotypes, prejudices, images, emotions, and narratives that contribute to a persisting system of systemic racism. This includes white men acting upon racist ideologies and stereotypes about the bodies and behaviors of Black women (i.e. promiscuous, hypersexual, jezebels, and morally deficit) as their justification for rape. Then, protected by the laws, practices, and policies of the state, these white men didn’t fear prosecution for the collective rapes. These men, working from the white racial frame, felt justified in their action knowing that their ‘morality’ wouldn’t be questioned. The white men were rarely prosecuted; African American women, their husbands, and their families had no recourse but to accept the benign neglect of the state to not prosecute. In this article, I will discuss systemic racism, the white racial frame, collective rape, and segregation stress syndrome, which is a collective form of PTSD.
... Most slave codes neither acknowledged nor sanctioned the rape of Black women due to several justifications; (1) they were perceived as naturally promiscuous; (2) as long as the act of rape did not threaten the maintenance of slavery, meaning the financial gain through economic production and the reproduction of offspring; and (3) the lack of concern regarding the victimization and trauma caused by rape (Russell, 1998). Speaking to the sexual abuse Black slave women incurred, Thelma Jennings (1990), summarized: ...
Purpose - This chapter examines how the intersection of race, class, and gender impact the experiences of Black women and their children within a broader socio-historical context. Methodology/approach - The epistemological framework of feminist criminology and the invisibility of Black women are used to draw an analysis on the American dominant ideology and culture that perpetuates the racial subjugation of Black women and the challenges they have faced throughout history as it relates to the mother-child dynamic and the ideals of Black motherhood. Findings - By conceptually examining the antebellum, eugenics, and mass incarceration eras, our analysis demonstrated how the racial subjugation of Black women perpetuated the parental separation and the ability for Black women to mother their children and that these collective efforts, referred to as the New Jane Crow, disrupt the social synthesis of the black community and further emphasizes the need for more efforts to preserve the mother/child relationship. Originality/value - Based on existing literature, there is a paucity of research studies that examine the effects of maternal incarceration and the impact it has on their children. As a part of a continuous project we intend to further the discourse and examine how race and gender intersect to impact the experiences of incarcerated Black women and their children through a socio-historical context. Copyright © 2017 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
In this book, James Gallen provides an in-depth evaluation of the responses of Western States and churches to their historical abuses from a transitional justice perspective. Using a comparative lens, this book examines the application of transitional justice to address and redress the past in Ireland, Australia, Canada, the United States and United Kingdom. It evaluates the use of public inquiries and truth commissions, litigation, reparations, apologies, and reconciliation in each context to address these abuses. Significantly, this novel analysis considers how power and public emotions influence, and often impede, transitional justice's ability to address historical-structural injustices. In addressing historical abuses, power fails to be redistributed and national and religious myths are not reconsidered, leading Gallen to conclude that the existing transitional justice efforts of states and churches remain an unrepentant form of justice. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Sex-biased admixture can be inferred from ancestry-specific proportions of X chromosome and autosomes. In a paper published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, Micheletti et al.1 used this approach to quantify male and female contributions following the transatlantic slave trade. Using a large dataset from 23andMe, they concluded that African and European contributions to gene pools in the Americas were much more sex biased than previously thought. We show that the reported extreme sex-specific contributions can be attributed to unassigned genetic ancestry as well as the limitations of simple models of sex-biased admixture. Unassigned ancestry proportions in the study by Micheletti et al. ranged from ∼1% to 21%, depending on the type of chromosome and geographic region. A sensitivity analysis illustrates how this unassigned ancestry can create false patterns of sex bias and that mathematical models are highly sensitive to slight sampling errors when inferring mean ancestry proportions, making confidence intervals necessary. Thus, unassigned ancestry and the sensitivity of the models effectively prohibit the interpretation of estimated sex biases for many geographic regions in Micheletti et al. Furthermore, Micheletti et al. assumed models of a single admixture event. Using simulations, we find that violations of demographic assumptions, such as subsequent gene flow and/or sex-specific assortative mating, may have confounded the analyses of Micheletti et al., but unassigned ancestry was likely the more important confounding factor. Our findings underscore the importance of using complete ancestry information, sufficiently large sample sizes, and appropriate models when inferring sex-biased patterns of demography. This Matters Arising paper is in response to Micheletti et al.,1 published in American Journal of Human Genetics. See also the response by Micheletti et al.,2 published in this issue.
Black women and girls are frequently left out of narratives on sexual harassment/sexual violence due to pervasive racism and sexism. Schools contribute to this silence by continuing to overlook the exceptional needs and experiences of Black girls. Therefore, this qualitative study used an intersectional lens to examine Black girls’ experiences with sexual harassment in an urban middle school. Results indicated participants experienced both physical and verbal sexual harassment and felt their concerns were largely ignored or/or minimized by teachers school administrators. Recommendations for creating safe spaces for Black girls in urban middle schools are provided.
This article examines divorce petitions filed by white southern women in the nineteenth-century slaveholding South that specifically cited “adultery” or “illicit relations” between their husbands and Black enslaved women as a reason for seeking a dissolution of marriage. White women have until fairly recently been exonerated from blame in slavery, seen as either benevolent bystanders to the worst excesses of slavery, or at least partial victims themselves within the matrix of uneven gender relations in marriage. Yet increasingly more evidence has shown that white slaveholding women, wielded “soft power” in their own right. They manipulated their reputations as “good southern wives and mothers” to win the favour of the courts by discrediting their wayward husbands and the enslaved women with whom they engaged in sexual relationships in their divorce petitions submitted to the higher authority of the courts. This often resulted in their petitions being granted and alimony awarded, which enabled them to support themselves and their children as single women. The court petitions thus provide vital evidence in further understanding how race, class, and gender interacted, to provide a measure of agency for some white women whilst reinforcing the constraints of negative gendered racial stereotypes for Black, enslaved women.
Nuremburg trial evidence demonstrated that Nazis sought methods of mass sterilization of Jewish women. Immediately upon arrival at the concentration camps, over 98% of women stopped menstruating. There has been minimal investigation as to the cause(s) of amenorrhea, beyond malnutrition and trauma. The major objectives of this article are to 1) provide an alternate hypothesis to explain women's amenorrhea, i.e., surreptitious administration of exogenous hormones to women; 2) detail survivors' reproductive histories so as to demonstrate long-term sequellae, especially pregnancy losses; 3) provide women's subjective narratives of the short- and long-term experience of reproductive losses; 4) link women's amenorrhea, subsequent primary and secondary infertility and the evidence for the hypothesized causal mechanism, i.e., the administration of sex steroids which might have led to both immediate and long-term reproductive impacts. We conducted telephone interviews from 2018 to 2021 with Holocaust survivors internationally in 4 languages. We collected 93 testimonies from female Holocaust survivors (average age 92.5) or offspring who could provide complete reproductive histories for survivors. The interviews focused on reproductive histories, including amenorrhea beginning in 1942–45, subsequent attempts to conceive, numbers of pregnancies, miscarriages and stillbirths. Ninety-eight percent of women interviewed were unable to conceive or carry to term their desired number of children. Of 197 confirmed pregnancies, at least 48 (24.4%) ended in miscarriages, 13 (6.6%) in stillbirths and 136 (69.0%) in live births. The true number of pregnancy losses is likely much higher. Only 15/93 (16.1%) of women were able to carry more than two babies to term, despite most wanting more children desperately. Amenorrhea among Jewish women arriving at concentration camps was too uniform and sudden to be effected only by trauma and/or malnutrition. Survivors' narratives and historical evidence suggest the role of exogenous hormones, administered without women's knowledge to induce amenorrhea as well as subsequent primary and secondary infertility.
Race-based medicine has been pervasively interwoven into the fabric of health care delivery in the United States for more than 400 years. Race is a historically derived social construct that has no place as a biologic proxy. In addition to valid measures of social determinants of health, the effects of racism require consideration in clinical decision-making tools in ways that are evidence informed and not inappropriately conflated with the limiting phenotype of race categorization. This policy statement addresses the elimination of race-based medicine as part of a broader commitment to dismantle the structural and systemic inequities that lead to racial health disparities.
O presente texto trata das reflexões iniciais das investigações em andamento de um projeto mais amplo acerca do protagonismo de mulheres negras em seus projetos e expectativas familiares no período da escravidão. Por meio do levantamento em fontes textuais de natureza eclesiástica e aquela civil e crime ─ devassas e processos de habeas corpus ─ abordamos narrativas de (sobre) africanas e as primeiras gerações daquelas nascidas no Brasil. Partimos de fontes (suas naturezas e abordagens diversas) que no limite sugerem pensar que foram escritas ─ ditadas ─ por pessoas da África especialmente seus testamentos e também devassas eclesiásticas e libelos civis. Mesmo não sendo necessariamente documentos escritos ou ditados por mulheres e homens escravizados expressam suas escolhas, vontades, desejos e percepções de vida.
Machine learning is a rapidly growing research paradigm. Despite its foundationally inductive mathematical assumptions, machine learning is currently developing alongside traditionally deductive inferential statistics but largely orthogonally to inductive, qualitative, cultural, and intersectional research—to its detriment. I argue that we can better realize the full potential of machine learning by leveraging the epistemological alignment between machine learning and inductive research. I empirically demonstrate this alignment through a word embedding model of first-person narratives of the nineteenth-century U.S. South. Situating social categories in relation to social institutions via an inductive computational analysis, I find that the cultural and economic spheres discursively distinguished by race in these narratives, the domestic sphere distinguished by gender, and Black men were afforded more discursive authority compared to white women. Even in a corpus over-representing abolitionist sentiment, I find white identities were afforded a status via culture not allowed Black identities.
Feminist Judgments: Reproductive Justice Rewritten - edited by Kimberly Mutcherson April 2020
Cambridge Core - American Government, Politics and Policy - Feminist Judgments: Reproductive Justice Rewritten - edited by Kimberly Mutcherson
In this paper, we discuss processes of self-development in the contemporary context of rapid cultural change and social/vocational mobility. People must make and remake themselves continuously as technology evolves; education must be life-long to prepare people for the fading of long-term jobs and the emergence of short-term consultancies. Traditional and stable cultural forms and mores rapidly give way to flexible practices in relationships and in work life. We focus on social media, particularly Snapchat, to illustrate how identities have come to be formed only for the immediate present in a visual medium. Claude Lanzmann’s refusal to include archival footage of the Jewish Holocaust in his film Shoah is a precedent for a timeless approach to history that recognizes the past only by its reflection in the present. We compare this notion to the psychoanalytic idea of transference, in which the personal past is understood to exist, to all intents and purposes, only in the present moment of the analytic relationship. This way of thinking allows us to orient ourselves to a cultural world in which the history of the self is sedimented into its immediately present manifestation.
This volume offers the first, in-depth comparison of the Holocaust and new world slavery. Providing a reliable view of the relevant issues, and based on a broad and comprehensive set of data and evidence, Steven Katz analyzes the fundamental differences between the two systems and re-evaluates our understanding of the Nazi agenda. Among the subjects he examines are: The use of black slaves as workers compared to the Nazi use of Jewish labor; the causes of slave demographic decline and growth in different New World locations; the main features of Jewish life during the Holocaust relative to slave life with regard to such topics as diet, physical punishment, medical care, and the role of religion; the treatment of slave women and children as compared to the treatment of Jewish women and children in the Holocaust. Katz shows that slave women were valued as workers, as reproducers of future slaves, and as sexual objects, and that slave children were valued as commodities. For these reasons, neither slave women nor children were intentionally murdered. By comparison, Jewish slave women and children were viewed as the ultimate racial enemy and therefore had to be exterminated. These and other findings conclusively demonstrate the uniqueness of the Holocaust compared with other historical instances of slavery.
Cambridge Core - Early Republic and Antebellum History - Unrequited Toil - by Calvin Schermerhorn
Taking as points of inspiration Peter Parish’s 1989 book, Slavery: History and Historians, and Angela Davis’s seminal 1971 article, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” this probes both historiographically and methodologically some of the challenges faced by historians writing about the lives of enslaved women through a case study of intimate partner violence among enslaved people in the antebellum South. Because rape and sexual assault have been defined in the past as non-consensual sexual acts supported by surviving legal evidence (generally testimony from court trials), it is hard for historians to research rape and sexual violence under slavery (especially marital rape) as there was no legal standing for the rape of enslaved women or the rape of any woman within marriage. This article suggests enslaved women recognized that black men could both be perpetrators of sexual violence and simultaneously be victims of the system of slavery. It also argues women stoically tolerated being forced into intimate relationships, sometimes even staying with “husbands” imposed upon them after emancipation.
This paper examines how Manu Herbstein employs his fictionalised neo-slave narrative entitled Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade to address the issue of sexual violence against women and to foreground the trans-Atlantic rape identities of victims and victimisers in relation to race, gender, class and religion. An appraisal of Herbstein’s representations within the framework of postcolonial theory reveals how Herbstein deviates from the stereotypical norm of narrating the rape of female captives and slaves during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade by creating graphic rape images in his narration. This study therefore shows that a postcolonial reading of Herbstein’s novel addresses the representations of rape and male sexual aggression in literary discourse and contributes to the arguments on sexual violence against women from the past to the present.
This paper examines how Manu Herbstein employs his fictionalised neo-slave narrative entitled Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade to address the issue of sexual violence against women and to foreground the trans-Atlantic rape identities of victims and victimisers in relation to race, gender, class and religion. An appraisal of Herbstein's representations within the framework of postcolonial theory reveals how Herbstein deviates from the stereotypical norm of narrating the rape of female captives and slaves during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade by creating graphic rape images in his narration. This study therefore shows that a postcolonial reading of Herbstein's novel addresses the representations of rape and male sexual aggression in literary discourse and contributes to the arguments on sexual violence against women from the past to the present.
Existing scholarship describes early southern evangelical churches as racially radical institutions that, as the eighteenth century surrendered to the nineteenth, capitulated to slavery, implementing accommodations intended to make them more attractive to respectable, slaveholding churchgoers. This essay argues that that transition was never as complete as suggested. Based on a set of 65 Baptist church minutes from congregations located in 4 different southern states, it shows how evangelical churches continued to exercise a degree of authority over slave-owning members and their treatment of bondpeople from the late eighteenth century through the end of slavery itself.
A few months after the death of one of the most infamous political champions of racial segregation in U.S. history, the American public was mesmerized when a soft-spoken seventy-eight-year-old black woman stood before cameras in December 2003 to announce that she was Strom Thurmond’s daughter. Thurmond’s heirs responded with the following statement: “The Thurmond family acknowledges Ms. Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s claim to her heritage.” Political mudslinging over allegations of interracial sex date back to the earliest days of the republic, but Ms. Washington-Williams provides a perspective rarely heard publicly: that of a member of a so-called shadow family. “It’s a part of history,” she said. “It’s a story that needs to be known. And so this is why I decided to come out and talk about it. And to bring closure to all of this.”1
Using data from 92 interviews, this article examines the narratives of African Americans' experiences as children and young adults during Jim Crow in the Southeast and Southwest. It gives voice to the realities of sexual assaults committed by ordinary White men who systematically terrorized African American families with impunity after the post-Reconstruction south until the 1960s. The interviewees discuss the short- and long-term impact of physical, mental, emotional, and sexual assaults in their communities. We discuss the top four prevalent themes that emerged related to sexual assault, specifically (a) the normalization of sexual assaults, (b) protective measures to avoid White violence, (c) the morality of African American women, and (d) the long-term consequences of assaults on children.
When Ben brought his new bride home to Clifton Grove in September 1853, the marriage had raised many an eyebrow among Sarah’s New Hartford neighbors, friends and family. New Hartford village, where the Hicks family home was, is located in the town of New Hartford in the county of Oneida, central New York State. Founded in 1789 by Jedediah Sanger, the village had demonstrated some remarkable transformations in terms of its economy and industry in the years following the American Revolution through the beginning of the Civil War in 1861. The wealth of the town developed rapidly owing to Sanger’s keen involvement in the purchase of turnpike company stock, which allowed him to hold some influence in determining location and routes. While the opening of the Erie Canal in October 1825 did much to move New Hartford’s trade toward the county seat of Utica, the village retained the use of water power with Sauquiot Creek and thus remained a presence in the emerging industrial boom of the Northern States.2 In Utica, industries such as textiles and paper manufacturing dominated the economic landscape alongside the continued existence of artisans and smaller craftsman, in addition to a sizeable number of those employed in white-collar occupations such as managers, clerical workers and shop assistants.
In her final speech before the Passage of Resolution 39, the U.S. Senate’s 2005 apology for lynching, Senator Mary Landrieu asserted: “Jazz legend Billie Holiday provided real texture in her story and song ‘Strange Fruit.’” In a review of various historical moments of lynching and antilynching efforts on the state and national level, Senator Landrieu introduced the lyrics of the song and further observed that “[s]omething in the way she [Holiday] sang this song … must have touched the heart of Americans because they began to mobilize, and men and women, White and Black, people from different backgrounds, came to stand up and begin to speak.”2 Attributing in an anecdotal way the formation of public actions against lynching to the power of Holiday’s singing, Landrieu seemed to agree with most former studies of the song that have focused on the racial and gender politics in Holiday’s rendition. This essay sheds new light on the politics of sexuality embedded in Holiday’s early nightclub performance of “Strange Fruit.” By examining her rendition outside of the conventional discussions of the song as a protest narrative, I complement and complicate the existing interpretations of Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.”
Research on sexual violence and rape during slavery often focuses on the dynamic between white men and black women. However, white women played an important intermediate role in the sexual violence of enslaved black women. Analyzing divorce petitions submitted during slavery, the unique role of white women and their responses to sexual violence carried out by their husbands offer additional depth to the discussion of rape of enslaved black women. Furthermore, this analysis adds to intersectionality theory with the concept of a web of intersectional incentives, tactics, and consequences that encourage the maintenance of oppression.
The article examines meat agriculture as a site for the production of knowledge about gender, race, and sexuality that spanned human and nonhuman animals. Livestock breeders and commentators alike parsed animal bodies for their susceptibility and resistance to “race suicide,” a popular early twentieth-century concept that, when applied to humans, signaled concern that white middle-class reproduction and masculine vigor were faltering. Race suicide discourses gained traction in breeding literature precisely because animal breeding functioned as a popular laboratory of racial knowledge and biopolitical management. Porcine racial categories stabilized the rapidly reconfiguring infrastructures of American meat consumption and discourses of racial decline and contamination that included both human and nonhuman animals. These categories both reflected and constituted understandings of human race, and thus the article demonstrates how human and nonhuman racial knowledges were locked in a fluid conversation about what types of lives were livable and what types of bodies were fit to receive violence.
The theme of this book has been that transport decisions taken on the single criterion of profitability will be seriously deficient. The reasons for this are (1) that the transport sector is subject to major indivisibilities, joint costs and economies of scale which mean that marginal private cost may often be well below average, and (2) that transport systems are major creators of externalities, which are not taken into account by individuals in their market behaviour.
Freeing Charles recounts the life and epic rescue of captured fugitive slave Charles Nalle of Culpeper, Virginia, who was forcibly liberated by Harriet Tubman and others in Troy, New York, on April 27, 1860. Scott Christianson follows Nalle from his enslavement by the Hansborough family in Virginia through his escape by the Underground Railroad and his experiences in the North on the eve of the Civil War. This engaging narrative represents the first in-depth historical study of this crucial incident, one of the fiercest anti-slavery riots after Harpers Ferry. Christianson also presents a richly detailed look at slavery culture in antebellum Virginia and probes the deepest political and psychological aspects of this epic tale. His account underscores fundamental questions about racial inequality, the rule of law, civil disobedience, and violent resistance to slavery in the antebellum North and South.
The meaning of race in the antebellum southern United States was anchored in the racial exclusivity of slavery (coded as black) and full citizenship (coded as white as well as male). These traditional definitions of race were radically disrupted after emancipation, when citizenship was granted to all persons born in the United States and suffrage was extended to all men. Hannah Rosen persuasively argues that in this critical moment of Reconstruction, contests over the future meaning of race were often fought on the terrain of gender. Sexual violence--specifically, white-on-black rape--emerged as a critical arena in postemancipation struggles over African American citizenship. Analyzing the testimony of rape survivors, Rosen finds that white men often staged elaborate attacks meant to enact prior racial hierarchy. Through their testimony, black women defiantly rejected such hierarchy and claimed their new and equal rights. Rosen explains how heated debates over interracial marriage were also attempts by whites to undermine African American men's demands for suffrage and a voice in public affairs. By connecting histories of rape and discourses of "social equality" with struggles over citizenship, Rosen shows how gendered violence and gendered rhetorics of race together produced a climate of terror for black men and women seeking to exercise their new rights as citizens. Linking political events at the city, state, and regional levels, Rosen places gender and sexual violence at the heart of understanding the reconsolidation of race and racism in the postemancipation United States. © 2009 The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
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