The story of female slavery is the story of survival of Black women and their construction of a definition of womanhood that made sense to them. In some ways it is the story of the phoenix. Faced with misery and suffering that many succumbed to, African American women as a group proved resilient enough to triumph against the odds.
Despite their common bondage, men and women did not experience slavery the same way. Slave women experienced sexual exploitation, childbearing, motherhood, and the slaveholder's sexism. Slave women were exploited for their reproductive as well as productive capacities.
Stereotypes were devised to justify the sexual exploitation of Black women. Unlike white women, who were viewed as prudish, pious, and domestic, Black women were considered sensual and promiscuous, an idea used to sanction the rape of African American women.
The conditions under which slave women lived and worked only confirmed these stereotypes. In the United States, slavery after abolition of the foreign slave trade in 1807 depended upon reproduction rather than continual transatlantic importations; the burden of slave increase was on the slave woman's shoulders. Since causal correlations were drawn between sensuality and fertility, the increase in the slave population served as "evidence" of the slave woman's lust.
Slave women were no more or less lustful than other women but in slavery their bodies did not command respect. Unlike white women, Black women did not dress in layers of clothes. Black women often worked with their dresses lifted up around their hips to keep the hems out of the water, dirt, and mud in which they worked. Women's bodies were also exposed during whippings. Indeed some whippings had sexual overtones. Few utterances are as revealing as those of ex-slave Henry Bibb's master, who declared that "he had rather paddle a female than eat when he was hungry.".
Female slavery was also distinguished and structured by childbearing and childbirth.
