Therefore, the slave woman became emotionally isolated from her husband. This emotional isolation, when combined with the physical isolation that inevitably happened when slaves were sold, led to slave women having a greater affection and affinity for their children than for the men that fathered them (especially when such men included slave masters and slave traders). The result, White explains, is that slave women came to seek and accept the society of one another, and developed a hierarchy as such in which there was an informal set of rankings and prioritization. The Mammy character was generally at the forefront of this hierarchy, which was essentially a coping mechanism to deal with all of the perverted occurrences that chattel slavery in the U.S. inflicted upon all involved, (including slave owners).
White reinforces her contention that this institution was inordinately worse for slave women than for their male counterparts. The final mythological construct bestowed upon these women was that of the Sapphire, a woman who...
This characterization accounted for the lack of protection her male counterpart could provide, as well as the continual disillusionment of bearing children only to see them sold into slavery.
White's manuscript utilizes these three mythological constructs as a guide to elucidate various aspects of the lives of slave women. Although she discusses other aspects, such as means of resistance in the form of self-mutilations and abortions, these three constructs best illuminate the specific form of the hardship that slave women endured. The author stresses that they truly had none others but themselves to turn to in hopes of surviving a desperate, pathological condition at the hands of what must have appeared to them as mad men.
References
White, D.G. (1985). Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves In The Plantation South. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
