Sufferings of a Female Slave
Sufferings of a Female Slave
“Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly of their own” (Gates and McKay 294). Although male narrators like Frederick Douglas had touched on what slave women went through, the public had yet to hear it come from the mouth of a woman. Harriet Jacobs tells her story in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and brings attention to the problems and challenges of being a female slave.
Male slaves were usually doing laborious work while female slaves did more household chores. Jacobs confirms this by telling us that her grandmother was “an indispensable personage in the household, officiating in all capacities, from cook and wet nurse to seamstress” (Gates and McKay 282). Female slaves’ duties didn’t stop there. Not only did they have to tend to their biological children, they had to care for the slave owner’s children as if they were their own. From nursing to raising the child, they became the true sense of mother to them.
Female slaves also had to deal with the heartbreak of knowing the fate of their unborn children. All children born from an enslaved woman were automatically property of that slave’s master. Even if the father of the child was a free man (white or black), the child was born a slave…”the child shall follow the condition of the mother, not of the father; thus taking care that licentiousness shall not interfere with avarice” (Gates and McKay 293).
One of the most wretched sufferings that female slaves had to endure was the sexual exploitation by the hands of their master. At a very young age slave girls would be harassed by their masters verbally and it would almost always turn into rape. Jacobs speaks about her experience with her master Dr. Flint and how he made his advances at her when he began to “whisper foul words in her ear” (Gates and McKay 287). She was only fifteen years
“Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly of their own” (Gates and McKay 294). Although male narrators like Frederick Douglas had touched on what slave women went through, the public had yet to hear it come from the mouth of a woman. Harriet Jacobs tells her story in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and brings attention to the problems and challenges of being a female slave.
Male slaves were usually doing laborious work while female slaves did more household chores. Jacobs confirms this by telling us that her grandmother was “an indispensable personage in the household, officiating in all capacities, from cook and wet nurse to seamstress” (Gates and McKay 282). Female slaves’ duties didn’t stop there. Not only did they have to tend to their biological children, they had to care for the slave owner’s children as if they were their own. From nursing to raising the child, they became the true sense of mother to them.
Female slaves also had to deal with the heartbreak of knowing the fate of their unborn children. All children born from an enslaved woman were automatically property of that slave’s master. Even if the father of the child was a free man (white or black), the child was born a slave…”the child shall follow the condition of the mother, not of the father; thus taking care that licentiousness shall not interfere with avarice” (Gates and McKay 293).
One of the most wretched sufferings that female slaves had to endure was the sexual exploitation by the hands of their master. At a very young age slave girls would be harassed by their masters verbally and it would almost always turn into rape. Jacobs speaks about her experience with her master Dr. Flint and how he made his advances at her when he began to “whisper foul words in her ear” (Gates and McKay 287). She was only fifteen years
Cited: Gates, Jr., Henry Louis and Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2004. Print