More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas

PREFACE

The idea for this book originated in several conversations between the editors about scholarly works on slavery, slave societies, and women’s history. Recent scholarship indicated that there was a lively interest in these fields, but we wondered to what extent scholars actually engaged in intellectual exchange across them, or how work in each may have affected the other. Areas of inquiry may initially develop independently, but later on their connections may become clearer and more integrated work can emerge. Has this occurred in the study of slavery and women’s history? As interesting as this question obviously is, we thought that an initial stage in developing or finding a satisfactory answer would be to ask what work was being done on black women and slavery in the Americas. We were particularly interested in themes and conceptual frames. A call for papers produced an interesting set of clusters of themes, and these have shaped the organization of this volume, which, it is clear, does not have a comprehensive geographical or regional coverage within the Americas.

The contributors to this volume, focusing on the lives, situations, and experiences of slave and free black women, explore diverse dimensions of slavery and the related forces that shaped slave society to show that one of the most decisive of these forces was gender, however it may have been constructed in particular societies or applied in particular situations. To explore slavery and slave society through the prism of the lives of black women is to come to a better understanding of how much scholars have missed or misconstrued when they have used the term slave without due regard to gender, or with reference specifically to slave men. Gendered relations and expectations within the slave societies of the Americas constituted a powerful force that shaped the lives of slaves in such a way that slave women experienced slavery quite differently from slave men, although it is difficult to identify a strong sense of such differentiation in the slave laws. These laws lump the slave population of both sexes together in the interest of social control, presenting a homogenized image that conceals more than it reveals about the realities of slave life. The study of slave women through other kinds of sources, including plantation records and other accounts of their responses to slavery, help to reveal a more richly differentiated picture of slavery.

Black women were exploited as slaves in regard to both their productive and their reproductive capacities. Their resistance to slavery was rooted in a deep sense of the oppressive weight of this double burden which they were forced to carry and to endure. If slave women did not figure prominently in the organization of collective resistance such as revolt, it was not because they lacked the will but because, as mothers of children and nurturers of their families, they engaged in less confrontational or nonviolent forms of resistance that emphasized the need for creative struggle to survive dehumanization and abuse. In this they set an example for their children and menfolk. The chapters in this volume reflect these concerns about the value of the study of black women and slavery in the Americas. Together they help to present a sharper image of the forces of slavery against which black women fought for survival and for dignity, for themselves, for their families, for their children’s children, because they saw themselves as more than chattel, more than the personal property of another.

The materials discussed in the fifteen chapters facilitate the organization into three parts: Africa and the Americas, Life and Labor, and Slavery, Resistance, and Freedom. If part of the main concern of this collection of essays is captured in the subtitle, Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, then the African background context of the cultures and societies from which the slaves came to the Americas and the circumstances under which they were uprooted and transported through forced migration become matters of major concern. The first chapter, by Claire Robertson, in the part entitled Africa and the Americas, deals with that context and serves as an introduction to the book. Robertson’s deeply probing essay, focusing primarily on the issues of family and the sexual division of labor, suggests a number of ways to answer basic questions about what must be taken into account about African society and culture in order to interpret the experiences of black women under slavery in the Americas.

The eight chapters in the part entitled Life and Labor emphasize that black women in slave societies of the Americas were valued primarily because of their productive capacities as workers in a wide range of environments. Their primary involvement in commodity production and the supply of other labor services may have dominated the thinking of slaveowners, but black women struggled against enduring lives overwhelmingly devoted to work for their masters’ benefit. Within the interstices of the various slave systems of the Americas, black women opened up enough space for the realization of some autonomy. Richard H. Steckel, Cheryll Ann Cody, Mary Karasch, Robert A. Olwell, Hilary Beckles, Robert W. Slenes, Wilma King, and Brenda E. Stevenson focus on a wide range of issues within this thematic frame, including the health of slave women, their socialization, childbearing and rearing, motherhood, domestic work, life on the frontier, commercial employment and autonomy, and the significance of the black family.

Although scholarship about slavery in the Americas has expanded topically in recent years, slave resistance remains of major interest, partly because the nature of slavery invests the phenomenon with an enduring significance that is also related to the larger human struggle against oppression in its various forms. It is also partly because the growing interest in the history of black women in slavery raises new questions about resistance, or forces a reformulation of old questions that were perhaps once thought to have been addressed adequately. Building upon much wider contexts of slave life and labor, three of the chapters in the part entitled Slavery, Resistance, and Freedom focus on slave resistance to show that women were much involved in this complex response to slavery based demonstrably on their consciousness that they were more than chattel. Barbara Bush, David Barry Gaspar and Bernard Moitt explore the individual and collective efforts of slave women to challenge the forces of dehumanization and destruction inherent in slavery.

Collective slave resistance in the form of revolt was often aimed at the attainment of freedom ultimately, that is to say, freedom from white ownership and rule, but many slave women were able to obtain their individual freedom through other means. The origins of most of these women within slavery and the dominant impact of slavery as a shaper of relations in slave society meant in the end that freedom was always limited. In the last three chapters of this volume, David P. Geggus, Susan M. Socolow, and L. Virginia Gould explore dimensions of the worlds of free black/colored women and show that the study of the lives and circumstances of this section of slave society in the Americas, which was neither slave nor fully free, offers insights into the character of slave society. In slavery and in freedom, gender factors shaped the lives of black women in significant ways. Much work remains to be done, of course, on all of the issues raised in this volume; we hope that the work presented here will stimulate research into other questions that will ultimately lead to a better understanding of the different roads that black women in the Americas have traveled in their quest for true emancipation.

We would like to thank all of the contributors for their patience and support in the completion of this project. To Joan Catapano, Assistant Director of Indiana University Press, we offer special thanks for believing that no obstacle was too difficult to overcome. Thanks are also due to Connie Blackmore, Dot Sapp, Thelma Kithcart, Jenna Golnik, and Jane Twigg for typing the manuscript. Connie Blackmore and Jenna Golnik especially always seemed to make problems fade away with ease.

Finally, we acknowledge with gratitude the contribution of Celia E. Naylor-Ojurongbe, who graciously took time off from her own scholarly pursuits to work on the selected bibliography.

THE EDITORS

AFRICA

AND THE

AMERICAS

1

AFRICA INTO THE AMERICAS?

SLAVERY AND WOMEN,

THE FAMILY, AND THE

GENDER DIVISION OF LABOR

Claire Robertson

Among the many forms of socioeconomic deprivation, African slavery on both sides of the Atlantic has probably provoked the most historical debate, and recent contributors to it have focused on women slaves. Still, there has been little cross-fertilization of ideas between Africanists and New World specialists. It is time to remedy this situation. In the 1990s we need to look at our African heritage and the various sorts of issues that muddy the waters. The study of gender issues in particular provides an excellent lens for new analyses, while use of comparative method can clarify much about socioeconomic structure.

This chapter attempts to place New World African slavery as it related to women into the context of African slavery and culture, and by so doing illuminate both. It draws on my own and others’ African research and on recent research on gender with respect to New World slavery, especially the other essays in this volume. I will try to identify the parameters of some of the crucial issues and to widen the debate where appropriate, while acknowledging that there is a pressing need for more research. These issues include the definition of types of slavery and status deprivation; the matrifocal family debate, especially as it pertains to possible African retentions; and labor use with regard to gender, sometimes termed the gender division of labor, with particular attention to fertility issues as they relate to class.

This analysis is possible only because of the opening up of research on African slavery in the 1970s and 1980s that followed several decades in which the subject was almost entirely ignored in the explosion of African nationalism and pan-Africanism surrounding independence for most countries on the continent.¹ African and African-American nationalists often agreed that white rule had damaged male control over females. African men cited colonial laws that prohibited wife beating, while women were gaining economic autonomy, if not usually prosperity. African-American men felt that slavery had removed their authority to control their families—wives and children alike—and their power to protect them against white atrocities. Any attempt to consider women’s rights was seen as divisive and irrelevant; race oppression was the central issue.

We have now moved into a more radical phase of scholarly analysis. In it no one is exempt; everyone is equal. This equality assumes not only that humans are entitled to equality of rights but also that they have equality in human potential—that men, women, children, Africans, Europeans, African-Americans, and European-Americans alike share the complexity that makes human nature so endlessly fascinating. This means, however, that if virtue, intelligence, and altruism can be found universally, so can ambition, greed, and violence. In every group there are victims and oppressors and, especially in many cases of African slavery, it was possible to be simultaneously both slave and slaveowner. The determinants of the nature of oppression are not to be found in any essential human nature but in economic systems. If there is a universal human need, it is to maximize survival by maximizing gain, and most civilizations have employed slavery at one time or another to do so. At issue here is how African slavery in its cultural context relates to African-American slavery in the New World, especially with regard to women.

Types of Slavery and Status Deprivation

Slavery was universal in highly differentiated societies in the ancient world, including those in Africa. But its form varied radically in accordance with the economic needs of a society, which could change over time. Sub-Saharan Africa was an ancient source of slaves, albeit on a relatively small scale, supplying North Africa, the Middle East, and the Persian Gulf area. A few African slaves even trickled into underdeveloped northern Europe, but they were more curiosities than economic necessities in medieval times. It was only with the worldwide expansion of the European economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the European-American demand for African slaves assumed large proportions. An enabling factor in the development of this trade was the existence in Africa of an internal and an export slave trade. The export trade, however, seems to have been much smaller than the ultimate size of the New World trade.² In European eyes Africans made desirable slaves because they were accustomed to agricultural labor—most were sedentary horticulturalists—and they were able to endure harsh labor in the tropical West Indies. The epidemiological factor worked in Africans’ favor and against Native Americans, who died in droves from exposure to European-borne diseases. Africans also died in large numbers under the notorious conditions of the Middle Passage and from harsh treatment and hard labor in the West Indies, in particular; but ultimately they survived their masters and mistresses.

Those were not, however, the main reasons Africans were enslaved; nor was their race.³ They became slaves primarily as a result of the economic needs of Africa and the Americas. In both areas, wealth was to a large extent dependent on labor recruitment because ownership of land was useless without labor to work it. According to Mary Karasch (chapter 4 in this volume), frontier areas of Brazil in the early nineteenth century absorbed most of the slaves, drawing them away from older settled areas in a pattern similar to the large-scale sale of slaves away from Virginia to newer areas of settlement in North America. Richard Roberts and Suzanne Miers noted that expanding African states were often both the greatest suppliers (they sold their prisoners of war) and the greatest users of slaves.⁴ However, one should not push this analogy too far. There were major differences between sub-Saharan Africa, where most land was controlled but not owned by lineages,⁵ and the southern United States, for instance, where private land ownership eventually triumphed as the westward movement of European-Americans drove out Native Americans, whose concepts of landholding were more akin to those of Africans. Nonetheless, it is well to recognize that without a West African slave trade that took advantage of extensive interior trade networks, there would have been very little export slave trade because of the incapacity and ignorance of European-Americans regarding Africa and the ability of Africans to control trade and keep out foreigners. As Walter Rodney observed, the African ruling class enabled, assisted, and benefited from the slave trade.⁶ Thus Africa and the Americas have been inextricably linked by a trade that most scholars agree exploited more Africans than it benefited.

Large areas of precolonial Africa were underpopulated, hence the need for slavery, which served as a means both to recruit much-needed labor and to increase population. The export slave trade, of course, only magnified the need for slavery within certain African societies by depopulating some areas. Igor Kopy-toff and Suzanne Miers pointed out that slavery in Africa entailed a continuum all the way from relatively mild forms of clientage and pawnship to chattel slavery similar to the European-American form prevalent in the United States and the West Indies.⁷ There were areas in Africa where European chattel-type slavery existed owing to extensive European settlement, as in South Africa.⁸ This chapter, however, is particularly concerned with forms of slavery used by Africans. These forms were far more complex and varied than chattel slavery as it evolved in the United States. They were also usually less onerous. The variations can be explained by the tremendous cultural differences within Africa, the world’s second largest continent with thousands of languages and cultures, and by contrasting economic conditions. Mercantile rather than industrial capitalism characterized most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century West African economies; large areas paid tribute and had a fair degree of local economic autonomy. In the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the United States and the West Indies were required to meet the needs of industrial capitalist development in Europe and the northeastern United States. The routinization of slave labor in their economies was driven by the needs of the industrializing world, which forced ever-greater rates of exploitation in a foretaste of the relationship of the twentieth century developed world to the developing world, where mechanization in the center and partial mechanization at the periphery increased the rate of exploitation of manual labor. The cotton gin and the steam-driven sugar mill created a need for more slave labor in the nineteenth-century South and the Caribbean,⁹ just as the twentieth-century introduction of the plow to reduce men’s labor in breaking ground in sub-Saharan Africa greatly intensified women’s labor of cultivation. Similarly, the increasing involvement of West Africa in the legitimate export trade (not the illegitimate slave trade) in commodities needed for European industrial use, such as palm oil, increased the internal demand for slaves in the late nineteenth century.¹⁰

Despite vast variations in African forms of slavery, it is possible to make some generalizations. If the first striking characteristic about African slavery is its variability—from mild debt servitude to harsh plantation slavery—the second is its malleability. Even under harsh chattel slavery in Africa (usually called Islamic or market-based), manumission was possible for significant numbers of slaves. In the nineteenth-century Sahel, where a close analogue to southern United States chattel slavery existed, "because so many slaves were women, one feature of slavery … was the assimilation of females through concubinage and marriage and the automatic emancipation of children by slave women, if the master accepted paternity."¹¹ In fact, multiple modes of emancipation were a common feature of African slavery. Most slaves kept in Africa were women who, if they bore free children to their masters, could often be freed themselves. Moreover, male and female slaves usually had the right to keep any monetary earnings and so could buy their freedom more easily than was the case in the United States, although some owners did hire out slaves and keep most of their earnings, as in the United States.¹²

But most African slavery was not chattel slavery, even though most large-scale slavery was. More common was what has variously been termed lineage, kin-based, or absorptionist slavery, which was used primarily to increase labor but had as an essential feature the eventual assimilation of the slave into society. Two-generation slavery was therefore uncommon.¹³ The fact that most slaves were women aided this absorption, as did polygyny when women became junior wives to free men. In Islamized societies where free women were secluded, slave women performed, as they did in other African societies, most of the field labor. Pawnship was very common; most pawns were girls whose labor paid the interest on their fathers’ or other male relatives’ debts. If they were seduced by a male member of the creditor’s lineage, they would be married to him, with cancellation of the debt serving as bridewealth to legitimate the marriage. In such cases the status of pawn merged invisibly with the status of woman; both were disadvantaged.¹⁴ Such arrangements were particularly common in mercantile West African coastal society.

Less severe than pawnship was clientage, in which slaves had autonomy over most aspects of their lives but by law belonged to free persons or lineages and owed them a share of their crops, cash, or labor each year, as well as political loyalty. Such retainers were typical of African societal organization into lineage families, clans which recruited by birth, marriage, slavery, and free clientage.¹⁵ The distance between clientage and chattel slavery was great; one ultimate goal of clientage was to increase the free population (a comparison with the situation of Indian slave women in Brazil as mentioned by Karasch in chapter 4 is worth attention). While in most African societies slave ancestry carried a stigma, it could also be hidden because it was not usually associated with a caste bearing visible markers. In Africa, with the abolition of slavery ex-slaves usually became clients and beneficiaries of a certain patronage from former owners, whereas in the United States South this was far less common because racism, as well as continued efforts by whites to subordinate as laborers African-Americans who tried to evade that control, inhibited the development of clientage.¹⁶

However, slavery in Africa was not a benign institution. It was, as in the Americas, concerned above all with the extraction of maximum profit from the slave’s labor. To do so it relied on force. Claude Meillassoux’s description of Sahelian slavery could just as well apply to the United States plantation South: Desocial-ized, depersonalized, desexualized, slaves are susceptible to a severe exploitation not tempered by any concern about preserving their physical and social capacities of reproduction. In another telling description equally applicable to southern slaveowners, Meillassoux said that the [slaveholding] aristocracy must be a repressive class, armed, turned as much against the [free] people as against the slave class.¹⁷ The element of force was, of course, essential to the creation and perpetuation of slave systems, but even in this aspect Africans had many varieties of enslavement. A majority of slaves were probably prisoners of war, but kidnapping and judicial processes also accounted for substantial numbers, as well as the innumerable small transactions involved in pawning. The methods used varied in incidence over time and from place to place.¹⁸ In times of famine people sometimes sold their children to wealthier buyers or to passing slavers.¹⁹

There were also more means of escape in Africa than in the United States or the West Indies. If slaves were, by definition, strangers in their owners’ societies, in Africa some had the possibility of returning home, although if they had been very young when enslaved they often no longer knew their original homes or had lost rights in their natal societies.²⁰ Nonetheless, fleeing a cruel owner was more likely to be possible where there were fewer means of enforcement—no patrols to stop runaways—and societies nearby that did not practice slavery. Because of the kinship organization of the vast majority of societies, the slave or ex-slave might always be a stranger to some extent, but there were numerous methods for creating fictive kinship ties. There were also usually means for improving one’s status within slavery. In nineteenth-century equatorial Africa, for example, some male slaves became heads of free lineages.²¹ This was not a unique situation for precolonial Africa. It is therefore not surprising that given the vulnerability of kinless persons in many African societies (flight was more likely to bring reenslavement elsewhere than liberation, for instance), some male slaves preferred to buy slave women as wives for themselves than to buy their own freedom. There were also slave women who owned slaves.²² Those who have people are wealthier than those with money is an old Igbo saying.²³

To turn to slavery in the United States South is to narrow the definition of slavery considerably, despite the attempts at ameliorative views. Of course, slavery there did not begin as the relatively rigid institution it later became. In the early days of white settlement there was a continuum from white and black indentured servants to chattel slavery, but as the desire to increase the rate of exploitation arose with the development of industrial capitalism, slavery evolved in a segregated, castelike direction, with fewer opportunities for manumission.²⁴ Frederick Cooper noted that racial distinctiveness is a particular form of the more universal condition of the slave … being an outsider.²⁵ As the nineteenth century wore on, southern slaves had only those rights their owners chose to give them, which meant that they were completely subject to the arbitrary whims of those who profited from their labor. Even freed blacks in the South were constantly threatened with re-enslavement, and in the North they were subject to restrictions on mobility (many states had constitutional provisions prohibiting freed blacks from entry), education, occupations, meetings, and a variety of other activities.²⁶ Meanwhile, forms of debt servitude in which whites had participated mostly disappeared and were made illegal by the end of the nineteenth century.²⁷ In the West Indies they had disappeared by 1700.²⁸

Slavery elsewhere in the Americas—in the dependencies of countries which had not yet developed industrialized economies—could display all the African virtuosity in variations. Stanley Elkins was apparently confused and dismayed by Latin American slavery, which he found exhibited, in legal terms, a comparative lack of precision and logic … , an exasperating dimness of line between the slave and free portions of society, a multiplicity of points of contact between the two, a confusing promiscuity of color, such as would never have been thinkable in our country [the United States]. Manumission and miscegenation were common, and emancipation was accomplished smoothly,²⁹ with constant reminders of African forms of slavery. Freedpersons in Brazil filled essential economic slots, and many slaves bought their own freedom.³⁰

Nowhere is the distance between Africa and the southern United States more striking than in Cooper’s East African example of the use of slaves by owners as armed soldiers,³¹ also common in West Africa. While a random sample of Work Projects Administration (WPA) slave narratives yielded an example of a slave being used to replace his conscripted southern master as a soldier in the United States Civil War,³² it stood out for its uniqueness. United States slaves were allowed to bear arms for the Confederacy only as a result of increasingly dire conditions after March 1865.³³ If more prosperous freed blacks in the United States and the West Indies routinely owned and even traded slaves (see Susan M. Socolow, chapter 14 this volume),³⁴ there is little evidence that slaves themselves owned slaves (Hilary Beckles, chapter 6 in this volume, gives one example from Barbados). The conclusion is inescapable. Despite all the evidence adduced by Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman, Angela Davis,³⁵ and others regarding United States slaves’ refusal to be victims and their participation in making their own world, the fact remains that the definition of slavery as it evolved in the southern United States and the West Indies was much narrower than in Africa, the continuum truncated, and race used as a caste marker.

Marriage and the Family: The Matrifocal Debate and the African Heritage

Among students of slavery in the United States, no area has provoked so much controversy as slavery’s impact on African-American marriage and the family, probably because of the contemporary implications for welfare policy. The debate has centered mainly on the issue of matrifocality, defined as family disorganization, some scholars and policymakers claiming that both were a legacy of slavery,³⁶ others that neither occurred.³⁷ In this debate the use of African evidence has been problematical: dismissing African variability as proscribing any generalizations; describing United States slavery as so disruptive as to destroy any African cultural heritage; or, conversely, claiming that the African cultural heritage, in particular the matrifocal family model, prepared African-Americans in useful ways for their experience under slavery. Furthermore, lack of attention to African materials has led scholars to compare the status of free and slave males without considering women, as well as to ignore African accommodations to slavery in seeking to explain African-American accommodations to it. The comparison is always to free Africans, usually male. Most scholars demonstrate only a passing knowledge of African historical sources, which is understandable given its formidable variety and quantity. Here I will suggest insights on this debate that have occurred to me as an Africanist with a passing knowledge of the American historical literature. The comparison will be based mainly on analysis of pre-colonial nineteenth-century West African society and of United States slavery from the 1820s to the Civil War as found in ex-slave narratives (collected in the 1930s by the United States government’s Work Projects Administration) and in selected secondary sources. Owing to the nature of the sources it is not possible to give exact dates for most of the incidents mentioned.

The argument over African-American families has centered to a great extent on the nature of women as matriarchs, a debate reflected in the various views about African women. It is widely recognized that there are African societies where matrilinearity, female economic independence, or both gave (and give) African women more autonomy and precolonial political power than European-American women can claim historically or in the present. Most spouses in Africa did not and do not practice community of property. In many societies women have historically had the right to own and convey property without male permission. Coastal West Africa in particular has been a locus for extensive involvement of women in trade, with consequences that sometimes involved women having political and economic power. Many African societies had separate male and female structures that involved independent female political action; in southeastern Nigeria women’s collective action forced chiefs to abdicate and the British to change their form of colonial rule in the 1920s and 1930s.³⁸ There is, then, an argument to be made that African cultural forms that survived slavery might include wider and more authoritative roles for women than European-Americans generally recognized.

Indeed, the temptation to see Africa in the Americas is overwhelming, especially when analyzing the lives of slaves held in the United States. The Georgia Sea Islands supply images of women wielding long pestles threshing rice in huge mortars, wearing African-style headscarves or straw hats.³⁹ Karasch (chapter 4) mentions something similar in Brazil. In many places women carried babies on their backs as they toiled in the fields, slipping them around to nurse.⁴⁰ They carried water on their heads, walking gracefully along (Beckles, chapter 6). A striking example was the action of the Virginia slave Sukie, who, in disgust at male behavior while she was on the auction block, raised her dress to expose her genitals to potential buyers as a form of ridicule,⁴¹ an old accepted means for African women to protest against men’s actions. (To appreciate one of the profound cultural differences involved, it is only necessary to note that male exposure of genitalia is used in the United States to try to intimidate women.) And then there is, of course, the manifold evidence of African influence present in religious, linguistic, dance,⁴² and musical forms.⁴³ Given no cultural context for all of this, any African or Africanist would still have no problem in identifying, at the very least, strong African influence.

It does not necessarily follow, however, that relatively strong African female autonomy translated itself into African-American matriarchal women. Not only does female autonomy usually mean poverty rather than power, but also the issue of matriarchy is problematic both conceptually and in its use of African evidence. Suzanne Lebsock spotted the conceptual problem accurately; it has everything to do with American patriarchal notions and nothing to do with African evidence for matrifocality. Women are called matriarchs, Lebsock stated,

when the power they exercise relative to men of their own group is in some respect greater than that defined as appropriate by the dominant culture. Given this standard, women need not be the equals of men, much less men’s superiors, in order to qualify as matriarchs. … The woman who had no vote, no money, and no protection under the law was nonetheless a matriarch, so long as she also had no husband present to compete with her for authority over her children.⁴⁴

What about African evidence regarding matriarchy? The fact remains that we have no historical record anywhere of a matriarchal society in a sense equivalent to patriarchal, that is, where women held most positions of power and authority and dominated the society’s economic and ideological structure. Matrilinearity, common in Africa, is simply a way of tracing descent or inheritance through the female line from mother’s brother to sister’s son, not from mother to daughter in an analogue to patrilinearity.⁴⁵ Some analogous de facto (because not legal) matrilaterality (mother-to-daughter succession) occurred in Africa but was not dominant and coexisted with patrilinearity in the same society.⁴⁶

Matrifocality is a different phenomenon again. Contemporary sociologists and anthropologists have begun defining the basic building block of all societies as the unit of mother and children because the father’s degree of participation cross-culturally is so variable that hypothesizing the universal existence of the Western-type nuclear family imposes a false assumption. Because of the strong mother-child unit and variable male participation created by polygyny, one might claim some validity for a matrifocal African cultural heritage. However, polygyny was class-related and associated with wealth, and therefore with the kinds of people who were less likely to fall prey to the slave trade. Many slaves came from decentralized societies, which had difficulty defending themselves from the armies of centralized monarchies and were less likely to have large-scale wealth and polygyny. Poor populations were more vulnerable to slavery incurred by reason of debt and to the vagaries of their wealthy patrons. The slave trade absorbed mainly those who were less likely to practice polygyny. In fact, it is almost impossible to distinguish any specific matrifocal African influence in view of the probably stronger influence exerted by the economic constraints imposed on slave families (and free black families, for that matter) by a racist capitalist society. Poverty seems to have had a similar impact on Africans and African-Americans.

Most saliently missing from much of the discussion of matrifocal black families in the United States is class and gender analysis,⁴⁷ which is shunned by those who profit from black poverty while reinforcing it, and by some African-Americans who perceive the stressing of class and gender differences within the community to be divisive. The focus is therefore on race, which as an analytical (not a political) category contains no methods for finding solutions to problems, since this category invented by the oppressors disregards cultural, geographical, and class differences so completely as to be useless except in relationship to white oppression because anyone black is defined as other.⁴⁸ This is not to deny that race and racism have taken on a life of their own to force otherwise disparate groups to weld together for political purposes, but caste systems have real economic underpinnings, as does patriarchal and racist ideology, and can only be changed by attacking their economic foundations. To believe that the roots of oppression lie in seeking economic gain is to connect it to the universal need of humans to survive, not to instinct, which is biologically based and therefore immutable. Methods used by the dominant classes to maximize gain in order to ensure their dominance have changed and will continue to do so. Slavery was, above all, an economic system which displayed many variations and changes in order to maximize profit in a context of changing economic systems.⁴⁹

To carry out an analysis of possible African underpinnings of the matrifocal family, it is first necessary to define matrifocality. A matrifocal family is one in which the mother plays a substantial role in providing subsistence and making decisions. The father may or may not be present, and there is nothing necessarily unhealthy about it. According to this definition, many precolonial West African families were at least partially matrifocal, especially if they were polygynous. Each wife normally had a hut of her own in a common compound, the children staying with the mother until mostly grown, when males would join their fathers or have separate huts. Most West African women, whether poly-gynous or not, were (and are) expected to grow or buy the food for their families. If free women were secluded, slave women would grow or buy food for them under the supervision of their mistresses. Thus in the sense of supplying subsistence needs, African families were normally matrifocal. This aspect of African socioeconomic structure carried over into the New World and was reinforced by slavery. As Nancy Tanner put it, Black women have always been socialized to be strong and resourceful and to know that motherhood … is not mutually exclusive to working outside the home.⁵⁰

Decision making is another issue, however. In Africa even daily subsistence decisions—when to plant, what to plant, how much grain or other staple to dole out—were often controlled by men, although the division into women’s crops and men’s crops sometimes mitigated that control. Patriarchal rather than matriarchal authority was the dominant norm. So much was this the case that customary etiquette concerning eating in most societies involved separate dining, with men and older boys going first and therefore taking the major share of the protein, while women and children got the leftovers.⁵¹ Access to nutritious food was therefore status-related, and slave diet was often poor, consisting mainly of starchy staples. There were even social norms prohibiting women cooks from snitching from the pot in some societies, or making certain particularly nutritious foods (eggs, meat) taboo for women.⁵² Patriarchal ideology that stigmatized women as other—left, bad, awkward, wrong, stupid, and so on—was widespread in Africa and still has currency there, as elsewhere. We have had to discard romantic notions of egalitarian precolonial Africa, even while recognizing that colonialism created or vastly exacerbated existing economic inequalities in African societies.

It is very difficult, then, to make an argument supporting matriarchy, or even matrifocality, as dominant in most African societies. Rather, patriarchal authority dominated most facets of life even if women often had substantial economic responsibilities and autonomy. The problem is that too often women’s economic autonomy is assumed to entail economic and political power in both Africa and the United States. This has facilitated in Africa the scapegoating of women for social and economic problems (the ideal scapegoat has the image of power while in reality she is powerless to defend herself from victimization)⁵³ and in the United States the blaming of black families, women members in particular, for African-American problems created by the dominant sector of society. Thus on both sides of the Atlantic patriarchal ideology has contributed to blaming women for socioeconomic problems created by exploitation from the upper classes, with the added oppression in the United States of caste creation according to race and in Africa of the stigma associated with slavery and gender (all slaves’ work was stigmatized as being women’s work).⁵⁴

Patriarchal ideology has been abundantly evident in attacks by both white and black scholars on matriarchal or matrifocal slave family structure. There is prima facie evidence that many forces worked against male authority within United States slave households. The argument against the existence of male authority rests on two premises—that conditions under slavery were simply not conducive to the maintenance of family life and that male slave authority was undermined and the integrity of slave families therefore destroyed. Lack of male authority was equated with deformed or nonexistent families. W. E. B. Du Bois stated the case, supported later by others, when he cited such contributory conditions as squalid living, absence or lack of paternal authority, absence of working mothers, and poverty encouraging theft. Such a family was not an organism at best; and, in its worst aspect, it was a fortuitous agglomeration of atoms, Du Bois observed.⁵⁵ Richard O. Wade stated the case forcefully in his work on urban slavery: the bonds of slavery were a good deal stronger than the bonds of matrimony because children went with their mothers, who had only shallow affection for them; people had lots of temporary attachments; and women slaves outnumbered men in town.⁵⁶

Among the chief culprits reducing the stability of slave marriages was forced separation. Sale, inheritance of slaves, and the mobility of slaveowners broke up many families. In a sample of 499 ex-slave narratives, Paul Escott found that sale was the primary cause of separation of family members; 58.5 percent of the separations came from sale as compared with 9.4 percent from gift, the closest competitor.⁵⁷ Lorenzo Ivy’s mother’s master caught cotton fever and moved south from Virginia, breaking up seven slave families.⁵⁸ There are many harrowing tales of family separations.⁵⁹ A common, perhaps apocryphal, tale indicates the extreme anxiety among slaves regarding the evil effects of being sold—a mother and her small son, sold separately, meet again years later and get married, only to discover to their horror their true relationship.⁶⁰ There is some evidence that women may have been sold more frequently than men, despite assumptions in the literature that men were sold more frequently and willingly by masters because they were more valuable than women and masters did not want to separate mothers and children. The random sample of ex-slave narratives included ninety-six women and eighty-two men drawn from George P. Rawick, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, and Charles L. Perdue, Jr., et al., Weevils in the Wheat.⁶¹ In the narratives frequent mention was made of separation of mothers and babies by sale. Women were more likely than men to be sold (23.4 percent to 20.4 percent) and much more likely to be sold repeatedly (there were six accounts of women being sold several times versus two for men). It makes sense that owners would retain men, who were more valuable in their eyes, and sell women, the obverse of the situation in Africa, where women were more valued and retained and men were more likely to be sold. The preferential sale of women might have militated against the existence of stable families, unless the women sold were mostly childless.

The counterarguments employed to prove the strength, stability, and existence of slave families have by now been generally accepted. Most United States slaves lived in families which were relatively stable. Promoting their stability was in the interests of slaveowners, but families were also a means of resistance for slaves. Cooper noted that everywhere slaveowners relied on a combination of force, economic dependence, and social constraints to keep control over slave populations.⁶² Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman listed the three main functions of a slave family from the slaveowner’s point of view as to be an economic unit performing social reproductive functions such as cooking and handing out rations, an instrument for maintaining social control (reducing runaways and pacifying workers), and a means for promoting increase in the slave population. Owners employed a number of incentives to promote marriage, such as giving feasts or holidays, garden plots, and houses, and punishments for divorce or adultery.⁶³ The arguments for the stability of slave marriage also tend to promote the strong role of the male within the slave family. John Blassingame provides the best example of this, although Gutman and Fogel and Engerman also appear to believe that female-headed households are by nature aberrant and unstable.⁶⁴ Blassingame goes so far as to approve some of the more noxious aspects of patriarchal authority within families when he says, Many [male] slaves were lucky enough to have masters who refused to intercede in family affairs and allowed bondmen to punish children and beat their wives.⁶⁵ In fact, the situation of women slaves showed ample evidence of the exercise of patriarchal authority by both husbands and masters. Masters had to approve slave marriages but often did so at the instigation of male slaves. The prospective brides were not necessarily consulted (see Brenda E. Stevenson, chapter 9 in this volume).⁶⁶

There is a Mongo (Central African) saying, Don’t lose contact with your family if you don’t want to become a slave of your husband,⁶⁷ that refers to women’s vulnerable position in marriage when their natal family members are not nearby to protect them should their husbands abuse them. Many United States slave women were powerless in this regard. If the routine sale of slaves put all slaves at the mercy of their masters and mistresses, women slaves sold away from their families of origin not only were unlikely to be heads of matri-focal families if separated from them but also were in double jeopardy with no natal family to protect them against abusive husbands, although fictive kin might have performed this function. Katie Johnson, an ex-slave from Virginia, said that some good masters punished slaves who mistreated their wives, but others did not.⁶⁸ One slave was hanged for killing his wife.⁶⁹ On occasion bondman and master could unite in fraternal solidarity against a woman. Perdue gave an extraordinary account in which a mistress wanted William Lee whipped for throwing her down on the ground. He and the master went to the barn and staged an elaborate fake whipping out of her sight but not sound, then got drunk together.⁷⁰ In an early nineteenth-century West Indian example, Mary Prince helped her master’s daughter evade further beating by her drunken father.⁷¹ I found no parallel example of cross-class, cross-race female solidarity when a mistress did the same to protect a bondwoman.⁷²

In the West Indies there is evidence suggestive of more patriarchal relations among slaves indicating that male owners and slaves had a common interest in keeping slave women subordinate in order to profit from their labor (see David P. Geggus, chapter 13, and Bernard Moitt, chapter 12, this volume).⁷³ David Barry Gaspar (chapter 11) found in seventeenth-century Antiguan records six cases of slave men who had killed slave women but none of the opposite. A high male-to-female ratio may have exacerbated rivalries over women. B. W. Higman found that in the British West Indies in the eighteenth century, male slaves had greater social and economic status than female slaves and received more rations, clothing, and utensils from the master. They headed most slave households and held more skilled jobs than women did.⁷⁴ Patriarchal ideology and the allowing of privileges to male slaves may in fact have been occasionally successful devices used by slaveowners to divide and conquer the slaves whereby masters traded off authority over slave women to slave men in exchange for acquiescence to masters’ authority by the men. Miriam Tlali, a prominent South African author, suggested that white South Africans employed this tactic with some success in their attempts to control Africans.⁷⁵

It is possible, then, that in the desire to combat matriarchal ideas scholars have sometimes been blinded to the existence of slave patriarchy It is true that slave women, owing to their economic roles and residential separation from spouses (which occurred frequently from residence on different plantations as well as from sale), had a fair amount of autonomy Also, unlike free men, United States and West Indian slave men in the nineteenth century could not legally own their wives and children. All of these factors probably made for a more egalitarian spousal relationship than prevailed in white society at the time.⁷⁶ But one must beware of the masking of inequality by the use of relational terms; social intimacy did not negate economic exploitation: both were part of a highly authoritarian structure couched in a familial ideology, Cooper stated.⁷⁷ The institution of slavery was constructed upon and through patriarchal ideology; it reinforced rather than undermined it when reinforcing it suited its own economic interests. In a percipient analysis, Jacqueline Jones stated that

black women and men in the long run paid a high price for their allegiance to patriarchal family structure and it is important not to romanticize this arrangement as it affected the status and opportunities of women, even within the confines of black community life. … Former slaves were free only in the sense that they created their own forms of masculine authority as a counter to poverty and racism.⁷⁸

In fact, by vilifying female-headed households patriarchal ideology facilitates class oppression of black families. Here caste creation by race is particularly salient. Black families (here and earlier I use the term black intentionally to emphasize the racial category imposed by whites) have been the victims of conscious attacks by whites, especially under freedom in the United States and apartheid in South Africa. The main vehicle of this attack has been the deprivation of economic opportunities and imposition of poverty. Until relatively recently, blacks in the United States were barred from serving apprenticeships and joining unions and were discriminated against in wholesale fashion.⁷⁹ Only in the last few years in South Africa were they allowed to form unions or apprentice for highly paid jobs (such job reservation laws were forced to bend under the pressure of economic efficiency considerations). Poverty is a great disintegrator of male-headed families when societal norms enjoin that the male be the chief provider. To be female-headed is to be poor—because of discrimination against women expressed in access to education and jobs, disproportionately lower pay, and the assignment of all the domestic work and most of the child rearing to women.

Some middle-class feminist scholars have given so much primacy to the patriarchal ideology within households, which places an uneven burden of work on women, that they blame men for women’s oppression, which they locate primarily within the household. But a class perspective gives a truer view—that when the dominant classes find lower-class families to be possible obstacles to their complete dominance, they will have no compunction about attempting to destroy them, the first step being to remove men from the household. Employers prefer to deal with individuals rather than collectively organized workers; families, as well as unions, may provide organization. The destruction of families particularly applies when race is at issue, as racism facilitates the dehumanizing of the oppressed. African-American scholars, then, are absolutely correct in viewing the black family as demonstrating strength under adversity, as forming a bulwark against dehumanization, and as constituting a vehicle for resistance (see Stevenson, chapter 9),⁸⁰ while South Africanists have made similar arguments regarding African families there.⁸¹

It may be suggested, in fact, that since free United States black families no longer served the function of social control for slaveowners, they then became a threat and therefore were to be destroyed, or at least not fostered. Lebsock found that families of freedpersons in antebellum Petersburg, Virginia, suffered: "For free black women, the high rate