Some people envision the female slave of the antebellum period as a large, middle-aged, smiling woman who is always ready to serve biscuits.
But the “mammy” image of the female slave depicted in movies like “Gone with the Wind” is “just dead wrong,” said Tiwanna Simpson, an English associate professor.
Simpson spoke to a room filled mostly with female students at the African American Cultural Center Monday night about the role of the African woman in slavery.
The truth about women in slavery is much bleaker than the “mammy” image suggests, she said.
Women were forced to complete daily hard labor some people think was reserved only for men, Simpson said.
African women also faced what Simpson called “double oppression” – “They were black and female,” she said.
Simpson told the students that women were often forced to part with their children so slave owners could sell them in the American slave trade.
“The woman was valued not only because she could produce in the fields, but because she could reproduce more slaves,” she said.
For Daphne LaSalle, an ISDS senior, the reality of having children to produce slaves is too much to bear.
“If I were a slave and I had the choice, I wouldn’t bring children into the world,” she said. “Even if someone forced themselves upon me, I would inflict bodily harm on myself to keep myself from producing children to be sold into slavery.”
The prospect of an African woman being forced to have sex with a male to reproduce or even being raped by a white man was a reality in antebellum America, Simpson said.
And the freedoms of a child were based on the freedoms of its mother – a woman’s child by a white man would still be a slave, she said.
But for a woman to conceive children in the first place was a feat.
“There were constant miscarriages because of the hard labor the women had to do,” Simpson said.
African women also faced a societal stigma of being “lustful and overly-sexual,” she said.
“That view weighed heavily on the image of many of those women,” Simpson said. “Many whites feared them because they were seen in this way.”
Lynette White, a psychology junior, said her spirituality would have been the only thing to get her through the time.
“If I was living then, I would have struggled to have a sense of pride,” she said.