Sexual Exploitation Of Female Slaves During The American South

White explores the master’s sexual exploitation of their female slaves, and proves this method of oppression to be the defining factor of what sets the female slaves apart from their male counterparts. Citing former slaves White writes, “Christopher Nichols, an escaped slave living in Canada, remembered how his master laid a woman on a bench, threw her clothes over her head, and whipped her. The whipping of a thirteen-year-old Georgia slave girl also had sexual overtones. The girl was put on all fours ‘sometimes her head down, and sometimes up’ and beaten until froth ran from her mouth (33).” The girl’s forced bodily position as well as her total helplessness to stop her master’s torture blatantly reveals the forced sexual trauma many African females endured.

During the antebellum South, many Africans, who were forced migrants brought to America, were there to work for white-owners of tobacco and cotton plantations, manual labor as America expanded west, and as supplemental support of their owner’s families. Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative supports the definition of slavery (in the South), discrimination (in the North), sexual gender as being influential to a slave’s role, the significant role of family support, and how the gender differences viewed and responded to life circumstances.

One of the methods used to control African-American slaves was whipping them. They had a certain number of lashes depending on what they did wrong. “Overseers freely admitted that they relied on whippings to make slaves in the gangs keep at their work.” Owners of slaves noticed that the slaves would cooperate more efficiently if the fed, clothed and housed them. “Thus, planters’ self-interest probably improved the living standards for slaves in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the slave population grew at a rate only slightly below that of the white southerners.” They allowed them to have families so that they can reproduce and make more slaves for the labor. The work was hard and intense, but what kept them going was the fear of getting whipped at the bottoms of their feet. The planters would use the possibility of getting a better position as a. incentive to get the workers to cooperate and work harder. They were given special privileges for working hard like “extra rations, off on weekends, passes to visit a spouse on a near by plantation and the righto have a garden plot…” These techniques didn’t work for all of the slaves, resulting in them being severely punished and even killed.

The Impact of slavery had an effect on both men and women. However, in Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl it is evident that women faced many unique challenges that made their lives more difficult. Harriet Jacobs discusses her own experiences of all the hardships that she had to endure during her life of being a slave. During the period of slavery, some challenges that women experienced included the close interactions between female slaves and their masters resulting in the exploitation and sexual abuse as well as sexual advances that were endured by the women of slavery. Some of the other challenges women encountered were the duties that they were forced to carry out which were very tiring and demanding. The tasks that were

On Slaveholders’ Sexual Abuse on Slaves” was the selections from the 19th and 20th century of Slave Narratives. This document was published by the National Humanities Center in 2007. Throughout the document, an interview is being conducted from former slaves in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration Slave Narrative Project. This document explain the harshness the women slaves had to deal with from their slaves owners. The women had to give up sex willing or unwillingly. The women were beaten and had to please the slave owner whenever he needed them. The women also gave birth to many babies and the slave owners treated their own children as slaves. They raised the kids to become a slave worker. The southern political party was basically

Incidents in the life of a slave girl by Harriet Jacobs accentuates that the slavery system is evil and no good can be associated with it. Jacobs shows that slavery by its very nature extinguishes the morality and ethical values of slaveholders. Likewise, she highlights on the physical, psychological, health, social, and mental adverse implications of the slavery systems to the victims. Contrary, the seventh Vice-President of the United States of America and longtime Senator John C. Calhoun propagates on the significance of the slavery institution citing the benefits to the slaveholders and the slaves. This paper will provide a critical evaluation of Harriet Jacob’s condemnation of slavery in the context of the address by

Slavery has always been a highly debated topic throughout the years, often associated with the terms brutal, discriminating, and unjust. In her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, former slave Harriet Jacobs asserts that death is better than slavery narrowing in on the harsh, day-to-day realities she faces as a female slave. Through the effective use of a variety of rhetorical strategies, Jacobs conveys her intense disgust on how the slave owners enforce the maltreatment of their slaves, resulting in the slaves’ will to live to disappear.

Slavery, in my eyes, is an institution that has always been ridiculed on behalf of the physical demands of the practice, but few know the extreme mental hardships that all slaves faced. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs writes autobiographically about her families ' and her personal struggles as a maturing "mullatto" child in the South. Throughout this engulfing memoir of Harriet Jacobs life, this brave woman tells of many trying times to keep dignity, family, and religion above all else.

Looking back and seeing how bad slavery was not so long ago makes you think you have it so good now. Unfortunately for many African Americans that’s not the way they can tell their story. For many their story begins with being owned by someone and having absolutely no say for what they did with their own life, and had to follow somebody’s orders all the time. In the novel “Incidents a Salve Girl”, Harriet Jacobs demonstrates her story of being a slave which began when she was only six years old soon after her mother passed away then immediately being sold to her owners, the Flints, while her attempt to leave the cruel situation to gain her freedom. Jacobs demonstrates how she suffered both the physical and psychological abuse she suffered while she was a slave.

The ideology of true womanhood that operated in the United States in the nineteenth century was a thoroughly middle-class social ethic. A set of sexual stereotypes decreed women pious, pure, submissive, and oriented toward the home. Slave women suffered silently trying to adhere to the white middle-class ideas of how women were to behave. Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl chronicles the abuses of slavery and emphasizes the special problems faced by female slaves. Jacobs highlights sexual abuse, the struggle for self-definition, and the angst of slave women torn between their desire for personal freedom and their maternal responsibility to their family. While slave women certainly faced horrible physical and mental tortures, Jacobs suggests that there were distinct similarities between slavery and women’s oppression that southern white women faced in the south.Throughout

The harrowing story of Harriet Jacobs experiences with slavery opens the reader’s eyes to the special cruelty women endured under the watchful eye of their masters and mistresses. And while Jacobs openly admits that slavery is terrible fate for both men and women, there are additional burdens added to women who are forced to live under the commands of another. Jacobs writes, “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own.” This peculiar suffering Jacobs speaks of is often related to the morality of the soul, and the persistent pressure that women must endure under the control of their master, especially concerning rape and sexual harassment. Added on top of the physical punishment that all slaves experience, women, especially those born with beauty, suffer from moral failings when a master forces himself upon them. Furthermore, an additional pain women must endure, is that of motherhood. In a matriarchal society, women are responsible for the wellbeing of others, as was the case with Linda’s grandmother. Women has additional tethers to their lives which only serve to increase the pains of slavery.

In her poignant autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs offers the audience to experience slavery through a feminist perspective. Unlike neo-slave narratives, Jacobs uses the pseudonym ‘Linda Brent’ to narrate her first-person account in order to keep her identity clandestine. Located in the Southern part of America, her incidents commence from her sheltered life as a child to her subordination to her mistress upon her mother’s death, and her continuing struggle to live a dignified and virtuous life despite being enslaved. Using an unconventional chronological structure (interrupting the narrative to address social, political, or historical commentary) Jacobs centralizes few arguments such as the economics of slavery, hegemony, pain (physical & emotional) and the quest for freedom. However, she admonishes the reader not to be empathetic for her for “…it is not to awaken sympathy for myself [to which] I am telling you truthfully what I suffered. I do it to kindle a flame of compassion in your hearts for my sisters who are still in bondage” (Jacobs, 28).

When I see the news and hear about sexual abuse, or raping, I ask myself, what is the necessary? What is happening to this world? But now to read how some of those women were treated and sexually abused by their masters, I find it frustrating for them and disturbing for me to analyze how they could kept living that way. Also the wife, powerless to punish their husband, led them to punish and treat bad these women slaves. I understand that this wives were frustrated and didn’t find a way out, but still it was a bad thing to do. I can’t even think about what those women slaves where going through. Sexual abuse from their masters and “arbitrary beatings, increased workloads, and various forms of psychological torment”. (American History, 305)

Color consciousness also called ‘colorism’ is a phenomenon “in which persons of the same race discriminate against one another based on the lightness or darkness of one’s skin (Colorism - Skin Color and Intra-Racial Issues Among African-Americans).” The origin of colorism for Africans American does not begin not in ant ancient Africa or among the first black that were slaves, nor with the establishment of a slave community with American raised blacks. A white man invented colorism. White masters in slavery times used colorism as a tool to separate blacks on a plantation as a precaution to avoid revolts or unity among blacks. It was norm of plantation life for the master and any of his sons to rape slave women. In the antebellum south it was a right of passage for young white men to rape a black slave woman who was sexually objectified and eroticized. These encounters resulted in mixed race children that automatically became slaves and property of the master. The rape of black slave women was highly profitable to the institution of slavery especially when the importation of African slaves was banned in 1807 with the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves. It became a ritual for slave owners in the south, spurred with the economi c gains from cotton and demand for free labor. As the rape continued on plantations some children, results of relations between mulatto slaves and white masters could easily pass for white. There are many instances of fair-skinned slaves who posed as

Modern slavery can be defined as the act of recruiting, harboring, transporting, providing or obtaining a person for compelled labor or commercial sex acts through the use of force, fraud or coercion. In simple words, modern slavery means people who are brought, sold and traded within and outside the country. Human tracking is a form of modern slavery. The trafficker’s main goal or motive of exploiting and enslaving their victims by using innumerable forced and deceiving practices they use is to make money out of which it benefits them. There are two kinds of modern slavery exploitation that are: commercial sex and labor purposes. Commercial sex is when adults engage themselves in areas such as prostitution, red light areas, strip clubs, bars etc. Physical assault or violence comes under commercial sex. Child sex trafficking also prevails among societies. It is either approved by the child’s family members themselves or the child is kidnapped from their houses to work for sex trafficking overseas or within the country. Victims of commercial sex trafficking have disturbing significances on the victims, for example, like long-lasting physical and psychological trauma, depression, sense of being used and lonely, education deprivation, disease such as STDs, HIV, AIDS, drug addiction, unwanted pregnancy, malnutrition, social ostracism and even suicide/death. Similarly, labor purposes take up huge victims under modern slavery because of the simple fact that victims are used as