African American Women Slave Revolts

“Not Killing Me Softly: African American Women, Slave Revolts, and Historical Constructions of Racialized Gender” is an attempt by Rebecca Hall, to uncover women’s participation in slave revolts and to address a concern of why enslaved women were silenced in revolt. She also focuses on why certain aspects of slave revolt are seen as exclusively male activities. To accomplish her task, she uses a number of book excerpts from prominent historians, as well as many sources from accounts of slave revolts in history. Although Hall relies heavily on the works of other historians to support her argument, she also utilizes her own observations and experiences to strengthen her thesis. The significant points discussed in Hall’s dissertation are, the Prose of Passivity as a foundation of the silencing of women in revolt, as well as the gender role as a major contribution to the exclusion of women in slave revolts. In order to have a more comprehensible understanding of why women were silenced during slave revolts, one must first have a clear understanding of what a revolt is. For the purpose of Hall’s dissertation, a slave revolt is defined as any confrontational, violent, and/or coordinated act of resistance that kills or attempts to kill slave owners or their agents. To better illustrate the silence of women in slave revolts, Hall provides “Celia’s Conspiracy” as an example of a slave revolt initiated by a woman slave, Celia, who is completely erased from the account of the revolt. This example is one of many that Hall uses to illustrate the silencing of women throughout history in slave revolts. According to Hall, as well as many historical accounts of slave revolts, revolts seem to have become strictly a male responsibility. Many motives have been given to account for this perception of slave revolts, many of which Hall offers in her dissertation. One striking validation of revolts being strictly a male responsibility is that slave women, as mothers of