Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work

Chapter 2. As Good as Any Man: Black Women in Farm Labor

26 Because slaves were brought to America to serve almost exclusively as agricultural laborers, there is a clear link between Black women’s work and farm labor.The use of Black women’s labor during slavery laid the foundation for their exploitation long after abolition. In order to understand the labor market experience of Black women in the United States and the origins of privilege and disadvantage, we must begin with the initial work context for Blacks in America. Blacks were not the only group to be enslaved in the United States. Whites held other Europeans, Native Americans, and Asians in servitude .1 But the servitude of Blacks was significantly different from that experienced by any other group. Slavery produced an intergenerationally stable, coercible, racialized labor force. Black slaves were forced to perform backbreaking labor in the United States, but more than this they were objectified and dehumanized, a process that birthed a host of racist assumptions that were incorporated into the cultural construct of Blackness. Legal scholar Adrienne Davis argues that the experience of enslavement was markedly different for Black women and Black men. First, the work enslaved Black men did was analogous to the work White men did on farms, except for the fact that their labor was coerced. While Black men were occasionally assigned women’s work, Davis argues, “it was often for the specific purpose of humiliation or discipline .”2 However, Black women “performed the same work as men, while also doing the domestic work typically reserved for women, free Chapter 2 As Good as Any Man Black Women in Farm Labor As Good as Any Man 27 and enslaved.”3 The conception of women as the “weaker sex” did not apply to Black women. Indeed, Black women were not fully considered women at all. “In the eyes of colonial White Americans, only debased and degraded members of the female sex labored in the fields. And any White woman forced by circumstances to work in the field was regarded as unworthy of the title.”4 Yet enslaved Black women could be found along with Black men “carting manure on their heads to the cotton fields where they spread it with their hands between the ridges in which cotton was planted.” They “hoed and shoveled but they also cut down trees and drew wood.”5 Black women’s compulsory performance of men’s work in the fields appears odd in a society that crystallized gender roles, but their field work reinforced racial roles.White owners reconciled the oddity of Black women doing men’s work using the belief that Blacks were racially Other. Thus, it was perfectly acceptable to compel enslaved Black women to labor with no regard for gender distinctions. Just as the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) established that “the Black man has no rights that the White man is bound to respect,” the fact that Black women were rendered genderless in the work they did suggests that they had no claim to womanhood that White men could not ignore.6 However, for Black women the experience of slavery went far beyond the indignity of being forced to perform “male” labor. The widely accepted notion of a Black woman as property and the children she produced as profit meant that slavery denied Black women control of their bodies. As Adrienne Davis points out, Black women’s childbearing “created economic value independent of the physical, productive labor they performed. Southern legal rules harnessed Black reproductive capacity for market purposes, extracting from it the profits one might expect from a factory or livestock. . . . In its centrality to the political economy, enslaved women’s reproduction was arguably the most valuable labor performed in the entire economy.”7 The importance of Black women’s productive and reproductive roles posed challenges for slave owners seeking to exploit both. Legal scholar Dorothy Roberts argues that the slaveholder aimed to accomplish two incompatible goals. He wanted to “maximize his immediate profits by extracting as much work as possible from his female slaves O p p o r t u n i t y D e n i e d 28 while at the same time protecting his long-term investment in the birth of a healthy child.”8 These goals were irreconcilable. “Pregnancy and infant care diminished time in the field or plantation house,” yet “overwork hindered the chances of...