The ideology of slavery, defined in this essay as the notion of complete ownership and mastery of African American slaves that centred around slaveholder identity, shaped the social hierarchy upon which white liberty and security could be built. Due to the obsession with conceptions of manhood, honour and power only achieved through a maintenance of total control over everything the slaveholder owned, ultimately the relationship between African American women in particular and white men was defined by the upmost violence and subjugation. Although white women were regarded in a similar subordinate manner as black women on account of their gender, issues of identity, namely that “if [the African American woman] is rescued from the myth of the Negro, the myth of woman traps her. If she escapes the myth of woman, the myth of the Negro still ensnares her,”[1] meant that deep-rooted patriarchal views of gender solidified slavery’s place within society.
Above all, the factor influencing both gender relations and the ideology of slavery in the South was the conception of masculinity and resulting ideas of mastery and honour. Wood claims that “the linkage of race and class in white gender identity lies at the heart of mastery and honour.”[2] Nowhere more can attitudes to masculinity and its consequent effect on breeding and up-keeping the institution of slavery be evidenced through the indoctrination of young white men. “No less intense than the influence of slavery was the parental insistence upon early signs of aggressiveness, demanded by notions of white master-hood, before the child met the outside world at school. The male child was under special obligation to prove early virility.”[3] The fact that white men were taught from such a young age the values of honour which were so vital to ensuring slavery’s success demonstrates contemporary views of masculinity and, by implication, the conceptions of women as the opposite. Wyatt-Brown argues that “without such a concept of white liberty, slavery would have scarcely lasted a moment.”[4] This is captured through William Byrd II’s obsession with the complete control of his plantations, family, and slaves - his diaries provide a constant commentary on the struggle to keep control of his assets. Due to both masculinity and honour being so intrinsically linked in the 18th and 19th century South, this meant that for African American slave men, punishment and expectations needed to conform to the white man’s notion of masculinity. Left to do hard labour, the majority of male slaves were in the fields for 12-16 hours per day picking cotton or harvesting sugar cane. Although some women did partake in this work, much of it was undertaken by men as a result of conceptions of gender and the idea that men should be responsible for the physical aspects of labour. In this way, Southern ideals of manhood were translated into the everyday running of slavery.
The slave woman was at the very bottom of the societal hierarchy, due to the impossibility of her escaping her identity. For the slave woman, whose narrative is characterised as “infantile, irresponsible, submissive, and promiscuous,”[5] gender relations reinforced her position as the most inferior member of society. As such, the aforementioned white man’s obsession with total mastery of property extended to the black woman’s entire being, resulting in horrific acts exacted upon them. Camp argues that “in many instances female gender seems to have served as a license for planters’ full expression of violent rage, exposing women to cruel punishment more consistently than men,”[6] which, when coupled with the idea that married women “could not depend on their husbands for protection against whippings or sexual exploitation”[7] due to a resulting punishment for the husband, illustrates that black women provide the perfect example as to how the ideology of slavery and notions of masculine mastery were implemented into everyday life. Linking to this idea of the master’s violence against women was the idea of amalgamation or miscegenation. Proslavery writers adopted this term used for inter-racial mixing in arguing that emancipation would lead to the degradation of the white race, accusing abolitionists of wanting sexual access to black people. Not only did this feed into the white conception that black women were driven by sexual desire, but the irony is astounding considering the corporeal exploitation masters exhibited over their female slaves. The fact that by the early 20th century almost all states had passed anti-miscegenation laws proves that attitudes towards gender relations helped in protecting the institution of slavery. Yet the most common image of the slave woman is that of the ‘mammy’. Responsible for raising the master’s children and running the household when the family did not have time to take care of their own children, the Mammy was integral in the maintenance of the household. This consequently resulted in more constant surveillance than field slaves, showing that gender relations forced African American women into a life almost double the subjugation – being a slave and a woman in the South. As a result of gender relations and its help in reinforcing the ideology of slavery, resistance among slaves is also essential in understanding the experiences of African Americans women in particular. Among absentees, women partook much more frequently than men, but were not able to completely flee to the free North on account of their gender. Camp reinforces this by highlighting the woman’s significance within the community and family, stating that “many women understood themselves as persons in terms deeply connected to community; and they identified as women in part through their activities on behalf of their families,” and that “community sanctions against women abandoning their children normalised female dedication to the family, and were another pressure that limited the number of women who could escape to the North.”[8] This demonstrates that escape from the cruel sphere in which they lived and worked was more difficult for women than for men, fuelling the white slaveholder’s control over both gender and slavery and corroborating the inescapability of black female identity.
If the gender stereotype for the slave woman was one of promiscuity and lasciviousness, the white mistress was the antithesis. Presented as delicate and even colloquialised as the ‘Southern Belle’, she helped in amplifying the divide between white and black women. Despite being in a subordinate position to the man, the white woman still exercised considerable power in the domestic sphere. However, this narrative of the delicate white mistress was entirely undermined upon the onset of Civil War. With war changing the makeup of Southern society to the extent that roughly one million Southern men fought in the four years of war, white wives of slaveholders suddenly gained unwanted power in maintaining and upholding the institution of slavery. Faust claims that “slavery’s survival depended less on sweeping dictates of state policy than on tens of thousands of individual acts of personal domination exercised by particular masters over particular slaves,”[9] and this is best demonstrated through white female experiences during the Civil War. With a lack of male presence on the estate, popular fears of slave rebellion increased dramatically, especially in the wake of Nat Turner’s rebellion, which combined with the supposed vulnerability of white mistresses. Confederate leaders were “uneasy about the transfer of such responsibility to women”[10] for this very reason, with Mrs. A. Ingraham of Mississippi writing, “I fear the blacks more than I do the Yankees.”[11] These Confederate fears are exemplified through the way in which white women would punish their slaves. Typified by passion and impulse, elite women would often hit slaves instead of the traditional whippings, but “such behaviour was the antithesis of the orderly lashings that male managers idealised. True manly mastery exhibited control, not passion; honour was not satisfied by the meting out of vindictive beatings to social inferiors.”[12] As a result, therefore, it can be determined that the entire ideology of slavery, which was built upon the back of mastery, domination and patriarchal control was being undermined by women because of their gender. Because slavery could not survive without this patriarchal, masculine domination, ultimately the onset of Civil War can hence be seen to expose the flaws regarding the relationship between the genders which had not previously been addressed. What is also significant to note is the legacy of the relationship between gender and slavery in the South. Even after Reconstruction, thousands of American children born after slavery but indoctrinated with previous ideals of white societal and racial domination, “took up the cause and reconstituted it on new ground,” with the white home continuing to be where “white women would continue to be ‘ladies’ and managers of domestic spaces, both white and black.”[13] This suggests that Southern attitudes of gender were so ingrained and important within slave culture that even after its abolition during the Reconstruction era there was such a desire to romanticise and rebuild the hierarchy which promised white supremacy.
Although gender relations did significantly contribute to the shaping of slavery in the South, in the North the notion of the ‘cult of domesticity’ (the description of the home as a feminine space) was essentially an identical idea to the role of the domestic southern female slave; only with white women associating this with being independent and free whilst still conforming to the traditional gender power dynamic defined by female inferiority. The cult of domesticity supported the idea that women were in charge of the moral and spiritual development of their families, yet this is all too reminiscent of the ‘mammy’ - the phrase ‘women’s work’ “conjures the domestic […] and inevitably leans in the direction of the family,” as “images of enslaved female house servants tend to populate the collective imaginary.”[14] Hence it is justified to distinguish the two merely through the idea that public and private life in the free North were separate; but in the slaveholding South they were seen to be both spheres of labour. This suggests that race, not gender, was the overarching and most important factor shaping the ideology of slavery in the South, which is also corroborated through the status of poor white men of the South. For these men who generally lived on poorer agricultural lands, also known pejoratively as ‘hillbillies’ or ‘crackers,’ slavery and racism had a powerful appeal because it automatically elevated them within the social hierarchy, meaning there was a limit as to how far they could fall in society. By 1860, enslaved people totalled 40% of the South’s population, ultimately meaning that poor whites were already within the top 60%, perhaps one reason as to why there had not been a similar revolt to Bacon’s Rebellion since 1676. Thus, although gender relations certainly played a role in these men’s lives, it was conceptions of race that defined and shaped both their identity and the ideology of slavery most profoundly. Therefore, despite gender relations influencing the ideology of slavery, above all issues of race remained of the upmost importance, to the point where northern women seemed to be living a similar life to the domestic slave woman, separated only by their race and the guise of slavery.
Therefore, gender relations significantly shaped the ideology of slavery in the South through the idealisation of the dominant white man and all other members of society underneath him. In contrast to the North, which held women’s rights conventions like at Seneca Falls in 1848, Southern conceptions of gender only sought to maintain a patriarchal society fuelled by slavery. Yet while race remained the most crucial factor in justification of slavery, ultimately the importance of gender relations can be examined with the onset of Civil War, in particular how the patriarchal society starts to collapse when white men attempt to dominate a society in which they are heavily outnumbered – even by 1710, African Americans in Carolina outnumbered whites 2:1. Therefore, gender relations highlighted the deepest fears of white slaveholders which eventually became exposed in 1861.
Matthew Ainsby is currently in his first year of a BA in History and German at Durham University (University College).
Full question when assigned: To what extent did gender relations in the South shape the ideology of slavery between 1670 and 1865?
Notes: [1] Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1999), p. 28. [2] Kirsten E. Wood, ‘Gender and Slavery’ in Smith and Paquette (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas (Oxford, 2010), p. 525. [3] Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (Oxford, 1984), p. 154. [4] Ibid., p. 371. [5] White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, p. 27. [6] Stephanie M. H. Camp, ‘I Could Not Stay There’: Enslaved Women, Truancy and the Geography of Everyday Forms of Resistance in the Antebellum Plantation South, Slavery & Abolition (University of North Carolina, 2002), p. 13. [7] White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, p. 153. [8] Ibid., pp. 3-4. [9] Faust, Drew, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (University of North Carolina, 1996), pp. 53-54. [10] Ibid., p. 54. [11] William F. Pinar, ‘The Gendered Civil War in the South’, Counterpoints 163 (2001), p. 245. [12] Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (University of North Carolina, 2004), p. 132. [13] Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge, 2008), p. 20. [14] Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania, 2004), p. 145.