They worked mainly as maids, in the kitchen, the barn, and the garden. Enslaved women in New England had greater opportunity to seek freedom than in other regions because of "the New England legal system, the frequency of manumission by owners, and chances for hiring out, especially among enslaved men, who seized the opportunity to earn enough money to purchase a wife and children." Įnslaved women largely occupied traditional "women's work" roles and were often hired out by the day. New England was considered to be a society with slaves, dependent on maritime trade and diversified agriculture, in contrast to the slave societies of the south, which were "socially, economically, and politically dependent on slave labor, had a large enslaved population, and allowed masters extensive power over their slaves unchecked by the law." New England had a small slave population and masters thought of themselves as patriarchs with the duty to protect, guide, and care for their slaves. Historian Ira Berlin distinguished between "slave societies" and "societies with slaves". Ann Arnold was the wet nurse of a child whose parents were born in the English isle of Jersey. This portrait of Ann Arnold was the first individual portrait of a black woman in North America. New England Jersey Negro (1748), John Greenwood. The southern colonies were majorly agrarian societies and enslaved women provided labor in the fields, planting and doing chores, but mostly in the domestic sphere, nursing, taking care of children, cooking, laundering, etc. African and African American female slaves occupied a broad range of positions. Virginia girls, much less black girls, were not educated, and most were illiterate. All came from worlds where women's communities were strong, and were introduced into a patriarchal and violently racist and exploitative society white men typically characterized all black women as passionately sexual, to justify their sexual abuse and miscegenation. Among the Igbo ethnic group in particular (from present-day Nigeria), which comprised between one-third and one-half of incoming slaves in the early eighteenth century, female authority (the omu) "ruled on a wide variety of issues of importance to women in particular and the community as a whole." The Igbo represented one group of people brought to the Chesapeake, but in general, Africans came from an extremely diverse range of cultural backgrounds. Some prevalent cultural representations were the deep and powerful bonds between mother and child, and among women within the larger female community. African values were prevalent and West African women's cultures had strong representations. As most were from West Africa, its cultures were central in the mid to late eighteenth-century slave life in Virginia. Recent scholarship suggests that the number of women and men imported in this period was more or less equal and included a high number of children. Enslaved Africans on a South Carolinian plantation.įrom 1700 to 1740 an estimated 43,000 slaves were imported into Virginia, and almost all but 4,000 were imported directly from Africa. Main article: History of slavery in Virginia The Old Plantation, c. "The uniqueness of the African-American female's situation is that she stands at the crossroads of two of the most well-developed ideologies in America, that regarding women and that regarding the Negro." : 27 Living both female and black identities, enslaved African women faced both racism and sexism. With increasing numbers of kidnapped African women, as well as those born into slavery in the colonies, slave sex ratios leveled out between 17. Living and working in a wide range of circumstances and regions, African-American women and men encountered diverse experiences of enslavement. It was also abolished among the sovereign Indian tribes in Indian Territory by new peace treaties which the US required after the Civil War.įor most of the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth centuries, male slaves outnumbered female slaves, making the two groups' experiences in the colonies distinct. The institution of slavery in North America existed from the earliest years of the colonial history of the United States until 1865 when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery throughout the United States except as punishment for a crime. Elam advertised a "fine lot of Negro women, consisting of house servants &c." to Mississippi buyers in 1852
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