Toil and Trouble: The Lives of Enslaved Women
In the decades leading up to the Civil War (i.e., the antebellum period), enslaved people in South Carolina and Georgia’s Lowcountry and in the wider South were subject to atrocities (i.e., disfigurements, beatings, and lynchings) at the hands of enslavers, overseers, and patrollers.
“De Ku Klux was the terriblest folk dat ever crossed my path. Who dey was I never know’d but dey took Alex Leech to Black’s Ford on Bullet Creek and killed him for being a radical. It was three weeks befo his folks got hold of his body.” (Jesse Rice, Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 14, South Carolina, Part 4, 1937)
Equally devastating, however, were the harsh day-to-day conditions under which enslaved people lived and worked (and whose effects researchers believe contribute to current health disparities among Black Americans), which significantly contributed to their shortened life expectancy and higher mortality rates.
“We lodged in log huts, and on the bare ground. Wooden floors were an unknown luxury. In a single room were huddled, like cattle, ten or a dozen persons, men, women, and children … We neither had bedsteads, nor furniture of any description … beds were collections of straw and old rags … a single blanket the only covering.” (“Uncle Tom’s Story of His Life”: An Autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson, London, 1877)
Few escaped the grueling (tedious) work of cultivating and harvesting rice, cotton, tobacco, or sugar. Enslavers categorized field workers according to how much of a task they needed to complete in a day. Adult men and women were “full” or “prime” hands. Pregnant women, the elderly or children were “half” or “quarter.” Children, as young as four, weeded fields, gathered wood, carried drinking water, picked up trash, or fed chickens and livestock.
The dual roles of women as field workers and producers of offspring increased their economic value, but their lives were fraught with toil and trouble, especially throughout their reproductive years.
Myths about their supposed “hypersexuality” gave license to enslavers, overseers, and other men in authority to inflict sexual violence and abuses upon them. According to “Exploitation Through Sexual Violence,” (part of the Low Country Digital History Initiative (LDHI) online exhibit), “Sexual exploitation of enslaved women can be situated on a spectrum of experiences … ranging from violent penetrative rape to other forms of sexual harassment to formalized concubinage.”
“The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear. The lash and the foul talk of her master and his sons are her teachers. When she is fourteen or fifteen, her owner, or his sons, or the overseer, or perhaps all of them, begin to bribe her with presents. If these fail to accomplish their purpose, she is whipped or starved into submission to their will.” (Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861)
Art historian Jennifer Hallam, contributor to PBS’s “Slavery and the Making of America,” wrote, “The average enslaved woman at this time … gave birth to her first child at nineteen years old, and thereafter, bore one child every two and a half years … the slave mother on a large plantation returned to the fields soon after giving birth.
Enslavers also had little concern for slave mothers' health or diet during pregnancy, which led to high rates of spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, and infant deaths shortly after birth. After laboring in the fields—for up 16 hours a day--six days a week, enslaved women cared for their own children, cooked, washed, and kept their homes clean.
In the marsh areas of Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, working in the rice fields exposed workers to dysentery, malaria, and other water-borne diseases and parasites. Hallam said, “Infants of women working rice fields … had high mortality rates from exposure to this high-risk health environment.”
“Watering and weeding rice is considered one of the most unhealthy occupations on a southern plantation, as people were obliged to live for several weeks in the mud and water, subject to unwholesome vapours that arise from stagnant pools, under rays of a summer sun, as well as the chilly autumnal dews of night.” (Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States, 1836)
Wet nursing was another form of exploitation. Under this practice, Black mothers were forced to breastfeed the plantation owner’s children thus depriving their own infants—fed cow or goat’s milk--of the nutrients and protective properties of breast milk. White mothers believed that Black women’s breast milk, referred to as “liquid gold” could protect their children from malaria. Oftentimes, black mothers were beaten and forced to express breast milk to nourish white children.
Eventually, white women considered it beneath them to breastfeed and having a wet nurse was seen as a status symbol. Wet nursing gave rise to the caricature of “mammies,” women who loved and cared for white children while disregarding her own.
“My mother would have a baby every time my mistress would have one, so that my mother was always the wet nurse for my mistress.” American Slave, suppl.ser.1, vol.8, p.1243. (Mary Jane Jones speaks about her enslaved mother)
Notwithstanding their tribulations and constraints, Black women served important roles in their communities as midwives, healers, herbalists, and caregivers. From LDHI’s exhibit on “Reproduction and Resistance”: (They) used their knowledge of plants and medicine—knowledge passed down generationally—as a means of preventing pregnancy and attempting to induce abortions. Medicinal herbs were also used by the slave community to regulate menstrual cycles and assist in births.
In a speech for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s exhibit, “Women and Slavery,” historian Sylvia Diouf, commemorated African women who “carried with them their knowledge of medicinal plants and various crops, their skills at gardening and midwifery, their cuisines, their songs, dances, and stories, and their gendered traditions, values, cultures, and religious practices. Although their mortality rates were high and their fertility rates were low, they were the women who brought to the world the first generations of Americans.”
2024 Wista Johnson (Reprint by permission only.) Photo: 221440294 © State Library and Archives Florida | Dreamstime.com