Women, Slavery, and Labor in the United States

I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? – Sojourner Truth, 1851 (Robinson 1851, 4).

From the country’s founding, the United States’ dominant European-American culture included a patriarchal ideology which imposed a simplifying gender binary of male and female. Yet, when intertwined with the impacts of enslavement and racism, this ideology classified and treated African American women starkly differently from white women; it denied them any relative privileges of their gender. Enslaved Black women in the United States routinely did the same kinds of work as their male counterparts. Many women labored in agricultural fields; they even formed the majority of fieldworkers in some cases, such as with rice cultivation in South Carolina (Jones 2010, 15). Cast into “male categories” (Gillin 2014, 13), Black women were thus blocked from participation in the U.S. cult of domesticity in which white women of enough financial means avoided physical labor as part of their claim to femininity. Black women’s de-gendering is also clearly tied to race’s increasing entrenchment as a “historically produced technology of power” (Brown 1996, 110) that was used to justify an economic system dependent on enslaved labor. Jennifer L. Morgan has argued that “the entire system of hereditary racial slavery depended on slaveowners’ willingness to ignore cultural meanings of work that had been established in England and to make Africans work in ways the English could not conceive of working themselves” (Morgan 2011, 145). Black women’s de-gendering experience under slavery remains central to the development of Black feminist thought across the disciplines; specifically, theorists argue that, thus denied their identity by enslavers, Black women formed new gender constructs and new definitions of motherhood (Battle-Baptiste 2011, 42).

This last point brings up an important additional truth: there was one way in which women alone labored under slavery – as mothers. Enslavers’ claims on Black women’s labor included their reproductive capacities. The sexual coercion and abuse of enslaved women was systematic in the antebellum U.S. South. The rape of Black women by white overseers and enslavers was widespread, a feature as central to the slavery system as labor exploitation (Baptist 2001, 1619–1621). Additionally, enslaved Black men were often selected by slave owners as sexual partners or “husbands” for enslaved women against both parties’ wills (Berry 2007, 81). In both cases, children remained a key objective; enslaved women’s reproductive labor ensured the next generation of people in bondage.

Once these children were born, Black mothers typically found themselves forced to quickly return to agricultural labor – the care of their infants passed off to older children or the elderly infirm. Mothers also knew that their hold on these bonds remained tenuous as their children could be, and very often were, sold away from them by their enslavers. In the United States, Black mothers under slavery lost over half of their children to early death, whether through stillbirth or as infants or young children (Morgan 2011, 111). Enslaved women mourned the world into which they brought their children. In 1856, facing imminent recapture from slave catchers, Margaret Garner killed her two-year-old daughter Mary, wounded her other three children, and was readying to kill herself rather than return them to slavery (Frederickson and Walters 2013). Garner’s desperate acts were later the foundation for Morrison’s (1987) literary classic Beloved.

So, how do we make sense of a labor system that was at once de-gendered and highly gendered? How did enslaved women’s gender shape their labor and their lives? This special issue provides three distinct milieus in which to explore these questions. The articles specifically focus on the socialization of enslaved children via toys, on laundering as an arduous and distinctly female type of enslaved labor, and on enslaved women’s efforts to eat well and dress well as examples of resistance to a system that exploited their physical and reproductive labor and denied their humanity.

While the archaeology of children has gained increasing attention since the turn of the twenty-first century, specific challenges remain in studies of youth in enslaved contexts. For one, scholars have questioned whether children’s activities under slavery would have been significantly different from those of adults: in a system focused on labor extraction, would Black children have had time to play? An additional concern has been the complication of identifying the material culture of enslaved children, since their toys are generally assumed to have been handmade out of organic materials that would easily degrade. Colleen Betti challenges this logic in her review of formal mass-produced toys in enslaved contexts across eleven plantations in the U.S. South that were cataloged in the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS). While handmade degradable toys or even everyday objects intended for other uses may have been the most common playthings of enslaved children, formal toys have been found by archaeologists in slave-related contexts. The dolls, miniature dishes, marbles, and military toys Betti analyzes belie the idea that no enslaved children had access to formal toys.

What is most perplexing about these toys is their frequent lack of direct connection to enslaved men and women’s later labor. So, while play tea sets in nineteenth-century households have been interpreted by archaeologists as training white girls in the expectations of their adult domestic lives, these toys’ use by Black girls is more complicated given enslaved women’s limited access to such domestic rituals. Similarly, marbles have been interpreted by scholars as cultivating a sense of ambition, competition, and industry in white boys through games of chance that focused on acquiring other children’s property; but does such an interpretation make sense for Black boys, who were themselves treated as property? Betti takes two tacks in answering this question. First, she demonstrates how some types of play, like girls sewing clothes for their dolls, were directed related to enslaved women’s later labor for their white owners. Second, she argues that the toys also served to prepare enslaved children for all their future labor, rather than only tasks undertaken directly for their enslavers. For example, enslaved women – whether they worked in the fields or in the house – would have similar domestic tasks to attend to at home in the evenings and on any days off. Dolls and dishes could have socialized enslaved girls to these obligations. A final complication that Betti confronts is the question of who provided the toys and how the toys’ origin changes their meaning. Enslavers (typically offering hand-me-downs) and enslaved parents would have had different motivations for gifting toys, but in many archaeological cases, toys’ origins remain elusive, complicating their interpretation. Nonetheless, the gendered nature of the recovered toys indicates that these objects taught children about both social and labor expectations tied to gender.

Karen E. McIlvoy’s article moves us into the working worlds of enslaved adults, focusing on laundering as a type of specifically female enslaved labor that has been neglected in prior scholarship. Largely ignored by historians, laundering is also almost completely absent from archaeological studies on U.S. plantations. Given this inattention, McIlvoy seeks to provide a framework for the material identification, analysis, and interpretation of laundering. Her work to make this invisible labor visible begins with an overview of the task itself, differentiating more frequent “slop-washes” from periodic intensive “Great Washes” of bed linens, curtains, table cloths, and other household fabrics. McIlvoy breaks down the steps of the Great Wash into 13 tasks, demonstrating the process was both arduous and lengthy. Indeed, laundering in the Great Wash was described by former slaves as a brutal all-day undertaking. Laundering was also a specialized skill that slave owners valued, as demonstrated by McIlvoy’s review of advertisements selling enslaved women that take pains to mention laundering ability.

McIlovy ends her article with a consideration of how archaeologists can recognize laundering in the past; she urges them to consider the availability of wash water, to identify rooms with enough space for the task, and to look for buttons, pins, closures, and other clothing items that could have been accidentally lost during laundering episodes. Through a review of her own work at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest, McIlvoy urges archaeologists to try harder to recognize and analyze this invisible work. Ignored even in most contemporaneous records, laundering was back-breaking, monotonous, and meticulous labor in which enslaved Black women existed in a liminal space, following their owners’ general directions but also making many independent choices within these imposed constraints.

The final article in the collection centers on how women under corporate slavery at Virginia’s Dismal Town plantation used the economic system that stole their physical and reproductive labor for their own ends in a process that Cynthia Goode calls “resistive consumption.” The Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and Virginia is best known as a refuge for those escaping slavery because its forbidding landscape made recapture difficult. A corporate plantation on the swamp’s edge, Dismal Town, was established by the Dismal Swamp Company in the eighteenth century. Here, enslaved people dug and maintained ditches to drain the swampland and subsequently farmed rice and corn on the drained land. Enslaved women were expected to participate in the same arduous ditch and farm work as men while also serving as mothers to create the next generation of laborers. In the later years of Dismal Town’s occupation by the Dismal Swamp Company, only women and children remained to do all the plantation’s labor. Under these taxing conditions, the women of Dismal Town found a way to reassert their humanity through participation in the capitalistic economy that had exploited them. Specifically, enslaved women on the plantation purchased decorated ceramics and embellished clothing through a process Goode describes as resistive consumption. These items were unnecessary strictly for survival. Instead, Goode argues that they provided a means through which women who were used for their labor in a capitalist system in turn used the same system to reassert their humanity and personhood.

These three glimpses into the gendering and de-gendering of enslaved labor and its reverberations provide insights into women’s negotiations of a system that sought to exploit their physical and reproductive labor. We see this special issue as an invitation to other archaeologists – a challenge to make visible what has been invisible, to see the toils and torments of the past more clearly, and to more critically consider how gender shaped enslaved workers’ labor and lives.