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Fact check: How did slaveholders' narratives depict enslaved women's sexuality in the 18th and 19th centuries?
Executive Summary
Slaveholders’ narratives in the 18th and 19th centuries presented contradictory and instrumentalized portrayals of enslaved women’s sexuality: they simultaneously gendered women as reproductively valuable property and denied them the moral protections afforded to white mothers, while also casting them as morally suspect to justify control and exploitation [1] [2]. Historians emphasize that these narratives served enslavers’ economic and ideological needs, yet enslaved women resisted, forged alternative kinships, and complicated any single portrayal of sexuality or agency [3] [4] [5].
1. How Slaveholders Framed Enslaved Women: Paternalism and Property
Slaveholders framed enslaved women through a paternalistic property logic that claimed care while asserting ownership, portraying them as both valuable reproductive assets and as morally different from white women to rationalize control. This rhetoric masked coercive practices by invoking a supposed paternal duty even as planters selected and encouraged reproduction for economic ends; enslaved women's fertility was commodified and regulated as part of a broader system of exploitation [2]. At the same time, slaveholder narratives denied enslaved women the social privileges of white motherhood—such as autonomy over family life—making their maternal roles conditional and subordinated to owners’ interests [1]. These portrayals justified both everyday domination and institutional measures employed to secure labor and increase slaveholder wealth, demonstrating how ideology and economics reinforced one another.
2. The Contradiction: Valued for Labor, Devalued in Status
Slaveholder accounts show a stark contradiction: enslaved women were expected to perform the same hard labor as men and to reproduce future laborers, yet they were denied the gendered protections white women received. Narratives described women working “like men” and being assigned heavy field tasks while simultaneously being exposed to sexual exploitation and separated from kinship protections, underscoring how slavery erased conventional gendered privileges for people of African descent [1]. This contradiction produced a distinctly gendered form of oppression where physical labor expectations and reproductive coercion combined to deepen dispossession and vulnerability, revealing that slaveholder discourse functioned to minimize responsibility for sexual violence while maximizing economic return.
3. Forced Intimacy and the Politics of Reproduction
Enslavers actively intervened in intimate life, using a spectrum of coercion—from pressure and manipulation to outright forced pairings—to shape reproduction as an asset of the plantation economy. Detailed studies document the selection of bodies for desirable traits and the systematic encouragement or enforcement of childbearing to replenish and expand the enslaved workforce, indicating that reproductive control was an explicit component of slavery’s political economy [2]. Slaveholder narratives often sanitized or euphemized these interventions under paternalistic language, obscuring the instrumental violence involved in rendering enslaved bodies as sites of production and profit, and showing how sexuality was governed to serve property interests rather than personal autonomy.
4. Resistance, Alternative Kinship, and Counter-Narratives
Despite homogenizing slaveholder accounts, enslaved women resisted and created counter-narratives through everyday acts and community-making that challenged imposed sexual regimes. Scholarship highlights how women exercised agency—refusing certain liaisons, forming discrete kinship ties, and claiming maternal authority where possible—to preserve dignity and social bonds under coercive conditions [3] [4]. These practices reveal a plurality of experiences and a refusal to be fully captured by planter discourse; resistance took many forms from subtle evasion to overt defiance, demonstrating that enslaved women were active interpreters of their sexual and familial lives rather than passive subjects of owner narratives.
5. Interpretive Stakes: Why These Narratives Matter Today
Understanding slaveholders’ depictions of enslaved women’s sexuality matters because these narratives shaped legal policy, social memory, and modern historiography, often producing myths that persist about purity, victimhood, and blame. Scholars argue that the ideology of paternalism and the economic framing of reproduction continue to influence interpretations of gendered racial violence, making it crucial to interrogate planter sources while centering enslaved women’s own strategies and voices [5] [4]. Recognizing both the instrumental motives behind slaveholder narratives and the diverse lived responses of enslaved women provides a more accurate, ethically informed portrait of how sexuality, coercion, and resistance intersected under slavery.