Ar'n't I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South Reviewed

Introduction and Overview

Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South is a deeply disturbing read, owing entirely to its subject matter. The author details the intimate realities of enslaved women's lives during the chattel slavery period in the United States, uncovering and elucidating the depraved behavior of slave traders and slave masters from the perspective of the women who bore such treatment most directly. To her credit, White draws on a substantial body of first-person narratives to demonstrate that, contrary to the work of numerous historians before her, the enslaved subjects at the center of this story were women — not the undifferentiated mass that prior scholarship had described.

White's 167-page manuscript is organized into six chapters, each chronicling a different aspect of enslaved women's lives. The author examines the history of — and the convenient myths propagated by — slave masters and traders to justify their sexual violence against these women. She also elucidates the economic responsibilities of enslaved women, which were more multifaceted than those of their male counterparts. One of the more striking chapters reveals the relationships and informal hierarchies that formed among women as a direct consequence of their status as the property of others. Throughout the book, White contextualizes the condition of African American enslaved women against that of white women, enslaved Black men, and white Americans more broadly in the antebellum United States.

White's Methodology and Sources

White's analytical approach is firmly academic. Her manuscript avoids emotional appeals and concentrates on the documented record of enslaved women's lives. She undertook this subject in response to the negligence of prior historians who chronicled slavery as an experience belonging to an interchangeable mass, giving little attention to gender and how it shaped the institution of chattel slavery before the Civil War. As the author explains, most historians had described African American slaves through the mythology of "Sambo" — essentially as harmless, passive creatures incapable of meaningful agency — and she frames her book in explicit opposition to this tendency, aligning it with "an emphasis of recent literature on slavery" that "has been…negating Samboism" (White, 1985, p. 22).

To dispel these myths, White concentrates the bulk of her research on primary material. Of particular value were the records of interviews conducted by the Works Progress Administration. Although this program was created a century after the end of chattel slavery and was part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, White argues that the interviews "remain one of the few sources that present the unfiltered perspective and voice of slave women" (p. 24). Additional sources include correspondence from slave owners, newspapers, accounts from Civil War soldiers and travelers, and government census documentation. Together, these materials allow White to construct a comprehensive picture of slavery as it was specifically experienced by women.

The Jezebel and Mammy Myths

One of the central focal points of White's work is the shattering of the mythologies that slave owners deliberately perpetuated about their enslaved women. White carefully traces the history of three distinct myths which, in rough chronological order, cast the enslaved woman as a Jezebel, then as the quintessential Mammy, and finally as the Sapphire. These mythological constructs were crucial to the success of the slave trade, as they allowed slave traders and masters to justify their ruthless exploitation of enslaved women as objects, denying their humanity entirely.

The first myth — that all African and African American women were sexually promiscuous — has its roots in basic African traditions and the physical demands of enslaved labor, particularly in the fields. Due to differences in climate, culture, and daily life, it was common for African women to bare parts of their bodies in ways that Caucasian women in colder climates, governed by different cultural norms, would not. White men interpreted this custom as evidence of an overt, insatiable sexual appetite, an impression that was further reinforced by enslaved women laboring in the brutally hot rural South with less attention to their clothing than to avoiding the beatings of their masters. Images of raised skirts and other instances of partial undress were weaponized to perpetuate the myth that these women were simply gluttons for sex.

More importantly, the myth of the Jezebel served an economic function. By fixating on the supposed overt sexuality of enslaved women, slave owners were able to encourage maximum reproduction. As White argues, chattel slavery in America was sustained not merely by the labor of enslaved people but by the reproductive capacity of enslaved women. The benefits were clear: enslaved infants expanded the master's labor pool at no additional cost, at a time when purchasing a slave outright was genuinely expensive. Thus, the Jezebel myth allowed slave masters to increase their economic power by producing more enslaved workers for free while simultaneously justifying their own sexual exploitation of these women. Sex and profit converged in this myth in a manner uniquely advantageous to the master class.

Pressure from northern abolitionists eventually forced the mythology to shift. White's manuscript explains how the Jezebel image gave way to that of the Mammy, immortalized in figures such as Aunt Jemima. The Mammy was portrayed as non-sexual, good-natured, wholly devoted to the plantation household, and a central figure in its domestic administration. Mammies made ideal house slaves: they supposedly loved their master's children more than their own, were trustworthy, and willingly performed all of the domestic work that white mistresses found beneath them. By recasting enslaved women as Mammies rather than Jezebels, slave owners could represent slavery as a righteous, even mutually beneficial institution built on affection and loyal service rather than violence and exploitation.