Abstract
The sugarplum journey from West and West Central Africa to North American slave-owning properties was a brutally tumultuous and demoralizing one for enslaved African women born free. Their violent inhuman capture and New World exploitation marked the eruption of lawful domestic terrorism in North America during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. The previous chapters have shown how slavers engaged in unimaginable terroristic acts against enslaved women’s bodies and souls in order to further their aim of New World expansion. In this chapter we turn our attention to acts of violence between white women and enslaved African women. Just as “the voices from the past are needed to accompany contemporary women on their journey of recovery” from violence by men, women’s experiences of violence at the hands of other women are also critical. Countless enslaved women’s narratives name violence among women as a pressing reality during the antebellum period.
No one can humiliate you like one of your own.
—Judy Grahn
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Phyllis Chesler, Women’s Inhumanity to Women (New York: Plume, 2003), p. iv.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and white women of the old south (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 129–131.
bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), pp. 54
William Drayton, The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of Northern Abolitionists (Philadelphia: H. Manley, 1836), p. 104.
Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger”, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), p. 151.
George Rawick, ed., The American Slave, A Composite Autobiography, 19 vols. (Connecticut: Greenwood, 1972), 1
Louise Noble in Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folktales From the Gulf States, Zora Neale Hurston, ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 13.
Social scientists Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall have noted that, “Mulattoes in the Deep South were typically not the descendents of lower-class servants, but often the love progeny of the finest families. Early on, some plantation owners freed their mulatto sons and daughters, and helped them get a start in business or trade or in farming. Some even provided them with slaves of their own...As a result, mulattoes of the deep South attained the status of a separate Colored class...Those with light-enough skin and European features often passed as ‘White.’” See: Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall, The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color among African Americans (New York: Anchor Books, 1993), p. 15.
Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon, eds. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1968), p. 58.
bell hooks, Rock My Soul: Black People and Self Esteem (New York: Atria Books, 2003), p. 18
bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery (Boston: South End Press, 1993).
Iyanla Vanzant, Intro, Best Black Women’s Erotica, Blanche Richardson, ed. (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2001), p. xiii.
Copyright information
© 2009 Renee K. Harrison
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Harrison, R.K. (2009). “In the Company of My Sisters”: Violence among Women in the American Colonies. In: Enslaved Women and the Art of Resistance in Antebellum America. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100664_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100664_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38103-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10066-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)