Therefore, she was schematized similarly to her male counterpart (in regards to gender identity), giving her supposedly "equal" authority to him. Conceptions of a domineering, matriarchal black woman correspondingly emerged. "In Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder", Jennifer Morgan gathers journal entries from European explorers to make the case that white people used African women's bodies as an apparatus to "convey an emergent notion of racialized difference." For instance, in the mid-seventeenth century Englishman Richard Ligon wrote of the black women he encountered on his travels as having monstrous bodies, with breasts that "[hung] down below their navels, so that when they [stooped] at their common work or weeding, they [hung] almost to the ground, that at a distance you would think they had six legs." Morgan writes that this beastly description represented to Ligon, and similarly-minded Europeans of the time, the sole utility of the black woman's body as a producer of crops and more laborers. Additionally, their "monstrous" bodies suggested savagery, substantiating European conceptions of African inferiority to further legitimize African subjugation. .
The first comprehensive book to be written about enslaved African American women is titled Ar'n't I a Woman by Deborah White. In it White discusses the dual prejudice of racism and sexism that black women of the antebellum period were burdened with. Since women were distinctively valued by slaveholders for their reproductive capacities, childcare and childbearing were inevitable responsibilities of the the female slave. Thus, motherhood gravely circumscribed their lives. This was illustrated by enslaved women's compromised ability to run away, where breastfeeding and general concern for her offspring greatly limited a mother's mobility. However, motherhood did not mean that slave women were deprived of other strategies to resist their masters.