Ar'n't I a Woman?, Gender, and Slavery Studies

It is hard to believe that Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I a Woman? is twenty years old, for the questions it raised about private lives under slavery remain vibrant, resonant, and timely. It is a wonderful text to teach. I direct my students to the clarity of its style—the strong topic sentences, the carefully built paragraphs, the clearly stated lines of argument. These are not to be taken for granted in this era of complicated writing. One of the most important virtues of Ar'n't I a Woman? for undergraduate teaching is its bittersweet depiction of enslaved people's lives. In my course "Slavery in United States History and Culture" I immediately expose students, in much greater depth than most have learned before, to the nature of power—in this case, racist power and its impact on individual lives. Told from the perspective of enslaved people, the history of the antebellum South is a daunting one. For many students, the myth of moonlight and magnolias—of Gone with the Wind—holds sway. So after establishing in the first third of the course the truth of the brutality that upheld the plantation south, we then begin to consider how enslaved people, despite the brutality of the conditions they lived under, created family and community relationships that sustained them.

Ar'n't I a Woman? provides us with a gendered understanding of the slave community and relationships between enslaved men and women that avoids the competitive tone of the works of the 1970s. White's work focuses on the distinctive role of women in slavery without diminishing the role of men. At the heart of the book is the recovery of the experiences of black women, but that recovery does not occur in isolation from black men. White took to task previous historians of slavery who implicitly, explicitly, and carelessly defined slaves as male and ignored slave women, who are "everywhere but nowhere" in the literature.¹ When Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," appeared in 1965, most historical works on slavery had already created a vision of the slave family as dysfunctional and (with the possible exception of Herbert Aptheker's 1943 American Negro Slave Revolts) of slave men as "emasculated": deprived of their proper roles as heads of households by paternalistic masters; rendered permanent "boys" by white owners; unable to protect their wives and children from physical, emotional, and sexual incursions by masters and overseers (mistresses rarely, if ever, figured in these discussions); and limited in their ability to engage emotionally with children or lovers. The 1965 Moynihan report transported to the realm of public policy this vision of black family dysfunction and black male ineptitude, with a heavy emphasis on black women's power within the family unit, and proclaimed it the root cause of black poverty and related socioeconomic problems in the twentieth century.²

In the 1970s, historians John Blassingame and Herbert Gutman responded to the report's demonization of black men and black families, but at the expense of a fully drawn portrait of enslaved black women. Central to Gutman's and Blassingame's work of rehabilitating the slave family in the eyes of the nation was the recovery of black manhood. In The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, Gutman detailed the ways in which men were central to upholding sexual norms, monogamy, and marriage practices in slave communities. In Blassingame's The Slave Community, male slaves take the lead in familial relationships and in resistant and rebellious acts; indeed, the archetypal slave for Blassingame is consistently male throughout the text.³ These works sought to place men at the center of the moral and political world of the slave community.

In contrast, Ar'n't I a Woman? demonstrated the ways in which communities of women on plantations shared with men the duty of transmitting moral, sexual, and marital knowledge to enslaved men and women. Mothers controlled the sexual knowledge and courtship practices of their daughters; female midwives assisted in childbirth; women medical practitioners...