Females in American Slavery

Paper Summary:

The paper examines "A'rn't I a Woman?" by Deborah Gray White, which focuses on the roles of females in the pre-Civil War American society.
The paper discusses White's belief that female slaves endured not only racism but sexism and how stereotypes of both black women and white mistresses were totally unfair and untrue. The paper looks at how White explains the black female slaves' cultural survival. The paper concludes that the metaphorical question, "Ar'n't I a Woman?" is answered by the historical record of courage, resistance, survival and female heroism that comprised the experience of black African-American women during this period.

From the Paper:

"The historians of slavery of an earlier generation, as exemplified by Ulrich B. Phillips, painted a somewhat romanticized picture of slave life on the plantations that would be considered distorted and oversimplified by modern historical standards. This was in keeping with the ideology of "sectional healing" after the Civil War, in which whites in the North and South reunified under the infamous Tilden Hays Deal of 1877. That pact essentially sealed the fate of the political and economic reforms attempted under Reconstruction, completed the evacuation of the progressive Union Army from the South, and allowed white supremacy to return for many subsequent decades, until it was successfully challenged in the 1950s and 1960s by the modern Civil Rights Movement. Phillips distorted picture of the Old South featuring blissful student slaves on the plantation-as-school was challenged historians of the 1950s such as Kenneth Stampp and Stanley Elkins."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Boyer, Paul S.,Clark Jr., Clifford E., Kett, Joseph F., Salisbury, Neal, Sitkoff, Harvard, Woloch, Nancy, editors. The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
• Elkins, Stanley. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. 2nd ed. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1959.
• Phillips, Ulrich B. American Negro Slavery, A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1918.
• Stampp, Kenneth. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, New York, Random House, 1957.
• White, Deborah Gray. A'rn't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. Revised edition, New York, W.W. Norton, 1985.

More papers on Females in American Slavery:

• Analytical Essay # 131228 : "Females in American Slavery"
• Analytical Essay # 131151 : "The Gender Factor in American Slavery"
• Research Paper # 67250 : "Reparations for Slavery"

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