Teaching Ar'n't I a Woman?

Each spring semester, I begin my African American women's history class with images of black women from the seventeenth century to the present.¹ Students squirm in their seats because the first few slides depict enslaved women in coffles being transported to slave ships. Images of half-naked bondwomen, with agonizing facial expressions, exposed breasts, and children clinging to their ankles, shock the students. Some cringe when the next slide appears. Pictured is an enslaved woman forced to her knees, her arms twisted behind her, while two men stamp a hot iron rod on her shoulder to brand the initials of a slave-trading firm or slaveholder. Moving forward to the twentieth century, students seem relieved to see the familiar image of Hattie McDaniel from Gone with the Wind.² No more naked bodies, they think; no more distressing photographs. Yet this stereotype is in some ways equally disturbing.

I begin this course the same way Deborah Gray White opened Ar'n't I a Woman?—by debunking the myths, stereotypes, and misconceptions of enslaved women as the promiscuous Jezebel, the angry Sapphire, or the loyal Mammy. "In antebellum America," White explained, "the female slave's chattel status, sex, and race combined to create a complicated set of myths about black womanhood": one "carnal, the other maternal."³ I have been amazed by the way students seem comfortable with the Mammy stereotype. "Jezebel," on the other hand, is more difficult for them to discern because it means that they have to consider the sexual exploitation of enslaved women, which makes many students uncomfortable. The Sapphire stereotype, at least for most students, is represented by the domineering black woman they saw in such 1970s television characters as Esther from Sanford and Son or Florence from The Jeffersons.

Reflecting on her work in the 1999 revised edition, White noted that "there is now more history than myth" when it comes to our understanding of enslaved women.⁴ For two decades, scholars have used Ar'n't I a Woman? in survey and seminar courses, enabling students to think about the institution of slavery from a female perspective. In addition to how I have used the book in the classroom, this essay also discusses some of the reasons it remains the premier book adopted in history and African American, women, and gender studies courses at institutions of higher learning. Ar'n't I a Woman? is an instructive tool that I have used and relied on to teach the history of slavery from a gendered perspective.

The first time I assigned this book was in an undergraduate survey course on African American history. I opened the class with the following questions: What was the role of women in West African communities, during the transatlantic slave trade, on board the slavers crossing the Atlantic, and in colonial and antebellum America? Students were stumped because they had not considered that women's experiences differed from men's. They had not considered how a lactating mother had to take care of an infant during the middle passage; how a woman who had recently given birth had to labor in the tobacco, cotton, and rice fields of Virginia, Georgia, or South Carolina; or how women and men employed different resistance strategies. They came to class with the assumption that the enslaved experience was universal. Soon, however, White's scholarship pushed them to consider the lives of enslaved females. Students read Ar'n't I a Woman? in conjunction with Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In their midterm papers, they discussed the ways in which women and men experienced slavery based on these three readings. Many of them argued, as Harriet Jacobs poignantly expressed in her narrative, that "slavery was terrible for men, but far more terrible for women."⁵ They analyzed legal cases on Lexis-Nexis that involved bondwomen. Some wrote about the methods enslaved women used to cope with slavery.⁶ Some organized their essays around the life cycle of female slavery as White...