Definition of Slavery

The law did not recognize or protect slave families. Buying and selling slaves disrupted attempts to create a stable family life. Marriage of a slave woman did not protect her against the sexual demands for her master. Sometimes targets for the wrath of white mistresses were slave children of white masters. Slave work kept mothers from their children while spouses were always at risk to be sold. Broad kinship patterns had marked West African cultures, and they were reinforced by the separation of children and parents that routinely occurred under slavery. Slaves often created “fictive” kin networks. They helped to protect themselves against the disruption of family ties and established a broader community of

Slavery is an institution that repetitively separates family members and close friends from each other, without any regard to those people. This aids in disrupting the heteronormative nuclear family relationship greatly. Frederick Douglass said that “My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant…” and that “It is a common custom…to part children from their mothers at a very early age.”(pg. 1). This showing that most children that were born into slavery would grow up having no relationship at all with their own mothers. Also, a lot of slaves were born into slavery by the fact that “children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers,” (pg. 2) and the slaveholder now holds the title of father and master. With being torn from their mother at a young age and having your own father be your master, completely takes away the chance of a child that is born into slavery from having the “normal” nuclear family relationship.

He is also unable to form his identity based on familial relations. Suspecting only that his "father was a white man" and that it was often "whispered that [his] master was [his] father," Douglass was unable to name, let alone have a relationship with, his father (Douglass 255). Furthermore, Douglass writes that he and his mother were separated when he was a baby, and that he was never able to form a relationship with her because he saw her only "four or five times" (Douglass 256). Finally, he was also lacking a familial relationship with his siblings. He writes that "the early separation of [all of them] from [their] mother had well nigh blotted the fact of [their] relationship from [their] memories" (Douglass 272). Under slavery, slaves were not given the rights to family that many slaveholders took for granted. Any slave relationship could end at the whim of the "master." Every slave family stood the possibility of being sold away from one another and never seeing each other again. Slave women were forbidden from disclosing the identity of a child's father if the father was a white man. If the child was descended from the "master," he or she was considered no more human, and no more likely to be spared the trauma of being sold because slaveholders often bought women in childbearing years in order to increase the return on their "investment" when the children were sold. This created, on the part of Douglass, a lack

African-American slaves during that era used family as a means to focus their lives around something bigger than any one person. Utilizing the family

They did that to vanish the love which is between a mother and a child. Mothers or women were used as animals only for breeding. Regardless of their dignity and their marital status, slaves, whether male or female, were put together with another slave of opposite sex for breeding. It was a source of increasing their property, the number of their slaves, without any cost, the cost of buying a new slave as the baby born was also raised as a slave. Women, specially pretty women, were used mostly to kill out the fire of their master’s lust. They were raped as they might have not wanted to surrender to an animal. But what if they would have not surrendered, they would have been whipped severely until they had lost their strength to fight against cruelty and savageness.

When the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade ended in 1807, there would be no new slaves brought into the country so reproduction was imperative to maintaining the slave holder’s profit. First and foremost African American women had to be equipped to bear children and to raise them. A barren woman was separated from her husband and usually sold and it was not uncommon for slaveholders to demand their money back for female slaves they had purchased who had later proved incapable

Another action taken by the white masters was the act of making their female salves their personal concubines and then robbing the slave-mothers of their newly born children. This act was performed when the child was about twelve months old, just being old enough to be stripped from the breast that fed and nourished them. Even though most of the slave-children were of mulatto decent from their white fathers, sparing a child from the loss of its mother was not considered and highly deemed as showing favoritism towards the slaves. “Slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers; and this is done too obviously to administer to their lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the slaveholder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and father” (971). The mother of the slave-child was usually sold off to some plantation some distance away. This was done to keep her from trying to make any attempt to see her child and to rid the plantation of any witness of

The book depicts the harsh realities of the lives of slave women and how many of them were bought for the sole purpose of becoming their master’s sexual objects, beginning at the early ages of 14. African American women and girls were raped and objectified by their masters. It has been documented that, “Masters had sex with their female slaves, impregnated them and then adhered to the wife’s wish to separate her children by selling them to another plantation”

The first definition of slavery appeared as part of a document in the League of Nations Slavery Convention of September 1926. It defined the word as a “status of condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.” The document went on to define the slave trade as “all acts involved in the capture, acquisition or disposal of a person with intent to reduce him to slavery; all acts involved in the acquisition of a slave with a view to selling or exchanging him; all acts of disposal by sale or exchange of a slave acquired with a view to being sold or exchanged, and, in general, every act of trade or transport in slaves” (Weissbrodt and Dottridge, 4).

As it was common for large amounts of African slaves to live on one plantation, families began to become prevalent among slave communities. Slave owners actually encouraged marraige because it generally meant better moral among the slaves and thus less opposition, as well as, because slave marraiges meant children which would become the slave owner’s next generation of laborers. Therefore, slave families grew quickly and became a key aspect of slave culture. Instead of relying on friends on the plantation, slaves had their families to go back to. Black mothers found great joy and happiness in their newborns, even though childbirth deaths were common, but

Therefore, it is no surprise that “the slave women were never designated for being mothers. They were considered only as the breeder. Sethe’s mother - in law does not even recall the faces of her eight children. Similarly, Sethe was never nursed by her mother.”

Slavery has been a particular popular concept among humanity for centuries now. Most people who have gotten an academic education might be quite familiar with this. Many countries, if not all, have faced slavery at one point or another. It used to be common for powerful landlords to own many slaves to maintain their farms and clean their house. But is this the only definition for slavery? Is slavery only about a human owning another? Aren’t humans, in a way, usually slaves to society?

If I were enslaved, my meaning of human existence would be to try to figure out how I could survive and get through life without dying. I mention this because most slave owners do not care about their slaves. Most of the owners just want to make their slaves do unessacary labor and work them to death. As a slave, I will have to fight for my rights as a woman, while knowing that my master can take advantage of me. I would be thinking about if I were to get raped by my owner and potentially end up having kids by him. I would not know how I could raise my kids because they will eventually become slaves as well and I would not want that for my children. Also, if I were to have sex with another slave and end up getting pregnant, I will put my children

Another important characteristic is that slavery is normally used to exploit someone in economic activities. People are enslaved to make a profit because most slave master considered themselves as businesspeople. They have one only principle which is slavery is about money. If we put all these characteristics together we can define slavery in this way: It Is a social and economic relationship in which a person in controlled through the use of violence, suffering without earning anything and being economically exploited. It is common knowledge that slavery was abolished with the end of the Civil War. The South was unchained from the charged that

Neither patriarchal nor matriarchal marriages existed in slave families since all slaves, male and female, held almost no power over themselves let alone the other gender. It was the plantation owner who virtually had all the power to control every aspect of his or her slave, regardless of gender. Since childhood, both female and male, slaves encountered injustices and misfortunes that showed no favoritism for one particular gender over the other- both males and females were brought up together essentially the same way; preparing and waiting for the life of hardship and strenuous work that awaited for them (White 91- 118). In her book Ar’n’t I a Women Deborah Gray White illustrates extensive amount of slave narratives demonstrating the huge amount of control white owners had over their slaves as well as the slave norms by which slaves were brought up and married; and therefore proving that she is indeed right when she states that “slave families were unusually egalitarian.”