State of the Field: Slavery

Where has the study of slavery been in your field, and where is it headed? What scholarly traditions or literatures have contributed to--and benefited from--the study of slavery in your field?

I have a number of difficulties in answering this question…not the least of which is that I am not entirely certain how to clearly delineate the boundaries of my field.  Depending on the institutional context, I am alternately an early Afro-Americanist—in which case I would talk today about colonial history and the degree to which early Americanists are reckoning with the institution of slavery and it’s impact on the colonial past; a comparatavist—in which case my focus this morning might be on the ways in which the notion of Diaspora has forced parochial Americanists to reflect upon the connections between African American history and the history of persons of African descent in the English, French, Spanish, and or Dutch Caribbean, in Latin America, in Europe and, indeed on the continent of Africa.  Finally (maybe) I am a Women’s Historian—in which case the focus might be on cross-racial phenomena among women during the slavery period, or, more broadly on the ways in which interdisciplinary feminist inquiry has expanded the fields of African American History, Colonial American History, or the comparative study of Slavery writ large. 

But today I think I will define myself and my field primarily as a scholar of enslaved women.  I do this just to move things along a bit, and because I think that the sadly still a bit too-manageable field of the history of women in slavery illustrates in an direct way some of the challenges still to be dealt with in the broader historiographies I mentioned above.

There is simply no way to begin this discussion without reference to and acknowledgement of Deborah Gray White’s path breaking study of women enslaved in the antebellum American south, Ar’n’t I A Woman.[1]  Now nearing the twentieth anniversary of its publication, the text continues to both mark the inception of the field. It established many of the key theoretical issues that continue to define research agendas: sexual exploitation and sexual agency, the role of forced reproduction, reproduction as a space of autonomy, the notion of a female-centered world of work and support among the enslaved, questions about the relationship between the material experience of enslavement and the ideologies of race so crucial to both the slavery period and to its aftermath.  All of these issues were initially broached in White’s study.  Informed by the proliferation of slavery studies in the 1970s, White drew on evidence seemingly directly under the noses of those she trailed, a methodology evidenced, in just a single example, by Jean Fagin Yellin’s critical work on Harriet Jacob’s which was forged in the context of historians who’d dismissed the “hysterical” and “overly dramatic” text as simple abolitionist exaggeration.[2]  In other words, by reframing evidence that had been available to generations of historians before her, White illustrated both the gaps in both the ideology and the methodology of earlier studies.  It is this kind of repositioning that White did so well, opening up the foundational work of Blassingame, Wood, Gutman, and others to critical re-engagement.

White’s work, of course, did not emerge in a vacuum.  In the 1970s interdisciplinary anthologies on African-American women’s lives were published that ranged chronologically from slavery through the twentieth century.  Angela Davis’s 1971 article-length work on women in slave communities inaugurated a wide range of scholarship on African American women that was organized around the nexus of family, sexuality, and resistance.[3]  Studies generated around the larger questions of slave community and family as a whole, such as those of John Blassingame and Herbert Gutman propelled scholars, including Deborah Gray White, to engage more fully the parameters of women’s lives under slavery.  And indeed, in the 1980s, historical work on black women’s lives moved from margin to center.  With the publication of White’s work on the American South and Hilary Beckles’s work on enslaved women in Barbados, Barbara Bush’s study of gender in the British West Indies, Marietta Morrisey’s sociological work on the same topic, and a surge of work coming from scholars in other disciplines such as Hazel Carby, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Deborah McDowell, and Hortense Spillars, studies on women in slavery seemed destined to move, as the field does, in the direction of the particular—toward increasingly specific and less literary monographs in which the lives of these women moved irrevocably out of obscurity and stereotype.  But by the end of the 1980s, Evelyn Brooks Higgenbotham could still lament that “black woman’s voice[s] go largely unheard” in African American history, a lament that continues to resonate into the new millennium.[4]  [In studies of slavery]  Among historical monographs concerned primarily with enslaved women, there are currently only four full-length studies: Deborah Gray White’s Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, Marietta Morrissey’s Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the New World, Barbara Bush’s Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 and, most recently, Bernard Moitt’s Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635-1848.[5] In 2004 we can add Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom and my own Laboring Women, bringing the total full up to six—only three of which are geographically based in the continental United States .[6]

Part of the difficulty here, I believe, is the fact that so much powerful historical work has been generated on African American women in the nineteenth and twentieth century, work that likewise owes its genesis to the nexus of political activism and the forced integration of universities and curriculum by black feminist activists. That work is so multilayered, complicated and frankly numerically impossible to cover in this morning’s context, that I am constantly surprised when I sit down, as I have a number of times over the past year and a half, to assess the scholarship on gender and slavery.  For it is around the question of slavery that studies on women’s lives seem so few and far between.  And, of course, there is also an entire field of studies on the slave family, for example, or community studies like those of Brenda Stevenson or Lorena Walsh (From Calabar to Carter’s Grove) in which women’s lives are carefully centered.  Or indeed studies like Sharla Fett’s in which enslaved and free women’s interactions with one another and with the men of their communities receive rich and nuanced attention.  My caluculations also miss the work of scholars like Leslie Schwalm and Jane Landers who, by examining transitions between slavery and freedom or interactions between free and enslaved women of African descent, have profoundly added to our understanding of the interplay between race and gender both in and in the aftermath of slavery.[7]  Perhaps my conviction that enslaved women need a literature of their own is, oddly, old fashioned.  We should talk about that…

Studies that treat gender, race and slavery in the context of emerging American colonies are more widespread and are deeply indebted (as is my own work) to historians of early American women.  While initially constricted by a framework that focused primarily on the lives of white women, the fields of early American history, African American history and women’s history now inform one another as they always should have, and intersect in studies such as Kathleen Brown’s 1996 Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, a work that has set the stage for early American histories that follow.[8]  As historians have become increasingly committed to the ideas of intersectionality and to charting the process by which social/racial identities are constructed—a commitment that flows equally from the literary turn and the work of racial theorists and feminist scholars—early Americanists have used the colonial and early modern period to explore the process through which colonial subjects came into being.  Kirsten Fischer’s study of sex and race in colonial North Carolina exemplifies work that takes colonial identity formation seriously and explores the complicated ways in which social and juridical categories were called into being in early America .[9]  

White’s contribution to the field initiated the process of demanding that gender specificity inform all studies of enslavement—not simply those concerned with the family or with the sexual violence of slaveowners on the bodies of those they enslaved.  Ar’n’t I a Woman leaves a considerable wake, and in the twenty years since its publication, many scholars have taken the question of how gender, and in particular, how the gender of women, interrupts or resituates some of the conclusions and insights made by scholars of slavery generally speaking.  And it must be noted here, that despite the work of the scholars I want to mention here, the field of slavery continues to suffer, as has most other spaces of historical inquiry, from the assumption that gender neutrality equal universality, and that indeed, only women have gender. 

To conclude, then I am both dismayed at the paucity of works that are organized around the lives of enslaved women, and I am heartened by the degree to which complicated analytical frames infused with the intersectionality of categories of race, gender, and enslavement are becoming key referents in the intimately related fields that I delineated at the beginning of my remarks: African American history, African American Women’s History, Colonial American History, Women’s History, and the history of the Black Diaspora.  Just be certain to make clear to your graduate students that there remains plenty of work to be done.