Female Slaves: Sex Roles and Status in the Antebellum Plantation South
- 1 September 1983
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Journal of Family History
- Vol. 8 (3) , 248-261
- https://doi.org/10.1177/036319908300800303
Abstract
This paper analyzes female slave life in the context of female slave interaction and familial roles. It looks at the bonded woman's work, her control of particular resources, her contribution to slave households, and her ability to cooperate with other women on a daily basis. It suggests that in relation to the slave family, too much emphasis has been placed on what men could not do rather than on what women could do and did. It finds that the bonded female made significant "economic" contributions to the slave family, that the slave's world was sex stratified so that the female slave world existed quite independently of the male slave world, and that slave families were matrifocal.Keywords
This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit:
- The Age of Slaves at Menarche and Their First BirthJournal of Interdisciplinary History, 1978
- Woman's Place: A Critical Review of Anthropological TheoryComparative Studies in Society and History, 1978
- A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life at Mesopotamia in Jamaica and Mount Airy in Virginia, 1799 to 1828The William and Mary Quarterly, 1977
- The Nuclear Family in Afro-American KinshipJournal of Comparative Family Studies, 1970