Woman in Slavery: A Body

Woman in Slavery: A Body Not Her Own

In today's era of women's rights and women's general advancement in society as a result of decades of feminist activism, it is probably difficult for contemporary women to relate to what it must have been like for women enslaved, whose bodies were owned by their masters and mistresses. As a slave, a woman had no rights to her body (Coontz 238). As a slave woman, a woman would not be able to make a claim of rape if her owner forced his self upon her. Nor would she have the option to fall in love, to choose the man who would become her husband (238). Even in bondage, without choice, young girls and women felt responsible for the trespasses of their owners against their bodies, and held such incidents, which were often repeated and ongoing for long periods of time, as secrets of shame (Jacobs 55).

Harriet Ann Jacobs, in her book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, recounts how she kept secret from her grandmother that her mistress owner's (a child to whom Harriet had been gifted as a personal slave) father became her lover, though Harriet does not refer to him as such. Instead, she refers to him as the "old sinner (55)." Harriet kept secret that she had been raped by her mistress' father, and it is interesting that she describes the relationship without using the word rape, or sex, but does refer to it as the "greater wrong" done her, referring to her mistress' father's statements that he could not sell her to her grandmother, because she was not his to sell since Harriet had been gifted to his daughter (55).

Rape of former slave women did not cease with escape to the North or Union-occupied areas of the south during the Civil War. It will no doubt offend the senses of the many who believe that the presence of the Northern occupies in the South meant that former slaves would, at least then, own their bodies, if nothing else; but that did not happen (Schwalm 102). Rather, as Leslie Ann Schwalm (1997) writes in her book, A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina, writes:

"For many former slave women, rape and the threat of rape were part of life on the Union-occupied Sea Islands, a brutal manifestation of the contempt with which black women were viewed by many Northern whites (102)."

The lack of authority over the slave woman's body is exemplified by an 1850 daguerrotype of a young slave woman named Delia, found in the photo history of the era at the Peabody Museum (Sterling and Washington18). Delia was a slave girl in Columbia, South Carolina, and belonged to an owner named B.F. Taylor (18). She was "ordered" to pose partially dressed, nude to her waist (in the picture in Sterling's book), for purposes of "scientific studies (18-19)." The photographer, Louis Agassiz, a Harvard University professor, wanted to "study the anatomical details of the 'African race' to bolster his theory that blacks were a separate species, separately created (19)." As the authors of the book, We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century, Dorothy Sterling and Mary Helen Washington (1997) note that Delia no doubt experienced humiliation during the photo session, but the photograph portrays a young woman unaware of the sexual interest she might arouse (19).