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

It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to acknowledge Deborah Gray White and celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the publication of her book Ar'n't I a Woman? Like many people, I have had a long relationship with Professor White's pathbreaking work, first as a student and now as a scholar striving to follow her lead.

I first read Ar'n't I a Woman? in the spring of 1989 in a sociology class, "Black Womanhood in Culture and Society," taught by Deborah K. King at Dartmouth College. It was the first and only course I found in college that focused on black women and explored the ways in which African American women defined race and gender identities on their own terms. At a time when the culture wars raged on and at a school where a vocal contingent of students and alumni openly lamented the decision to admit any women, let alone black women, reading Ar'n't I a Woman? revealed to me an innovative and powerful model for conceptualizing black women's history and tracing the gendered legacies of slavery. By placing enslaved black women's labor, social relations, family life, reproduction, and sense of self at the center of her inquiry, White made clear that the history of black women could be theorized, researched, and written in terms that illuminated the fundamental imbrication of race and gender in nineteenth-century America. In the mid- to late eighties, far too many scholars of African American and women's history remained skeptical that such research questions were either viable or worthy of pursuit. White's work, however, marked an important and irreversible new direction in the scholarship, and opened the way for further investigation of slavery and African American women's enslavement. It was, in large measure, the experience of reading and studying Ar'n't I a Woman? that convinced me to enter a graduate program in history rather than go to law school. And for that I thank Deborah Gray White.

On the twentieth anniversary of its publication, Ar'n't I a Woman? stands as a cornerstone in African American women's history, having set forth key concepts and questions about black women's enslavement that continue to shape the parameters of African American women's history. By taking seriously the 1930s Works Progress Administration interviews with former slaves, drawing on the published nineteenth-century narratives written by such women as Harriet Jacobs, and reading slaveholders' records with a critical eye, White crafted an innovative and comprehensive history of enslaved women that amplified their voices and also listened to their silences. With her incorporation of cross-cultural research, furthermore, White presaged the growing attention to African American women's African roots and diasporic connections. Ar'n't I a Woman? thus put forth a methodology for contending with both a lack of sources about enslaved women and the abundance of sources about slavery written by and about slaveholders that continues to inform the study of slavery and, perhaps of greater importance, makes it less likely that future generations of historians will be pressed to "corroborate black women's sources with those of whites and black men."¹

White's explication of the degrading images and myths about black women's sexuality and her treatment of enslaved women's reproductive lives illuminated the ideological and physical violence leveled against enslaved women and established the interconnectedness of race and gender. The discussion of the "Jezebel" and "Mammy" images, in particular, cemented in the historiography a language and framework for considering how gender, sexuality, and reproduction informed slavery and enslaved women's labor, families, communities, and resistance.

The past two decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of studies charting African American women's history, but the history of black women's enslavement—their labor, reproduction, abuse, and resistance—remains generally marginalized in studies of slavery.² Stephanie Camp's and Jennifer Morgan's books go a long way towards highlighting and correcting this omission.³ Yet it is precisely the continued neglect of black women...