Gender

By: Maria Elena Raymond

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Gender

Gender roles in enslaved African American families in the United States before the Civil War were many and varied. Beliefs and traditions handed down through African family lineages; the pressures of environmental conditions (including geographical locations); British and American slaveholder practices in the treatment of their “property”; the forced separation of husbands from wives, parents from children, brothers from sisters; local politics and resulting laws with regard to the enslaved; the personal beliefs of individual slaveholders; and changing economic patterns were among the factors determining gender roles.

Throughout colonial American times, the slave population increasingly consisted not of Africans but of African Americans. The creation of an African American culture, replete with evolving gender roles, stemmed not only from African generational heritage but also from the influence of the British American world. Enslaved African American people and their families were forced to adapt to constantly shifting pressures and drew upon their own experiences and the experiences of their African ancestors to cope with daily life.

Law, Custom, Degendering

During the eighteenth century Patrick Henry, who was then prominent in colonial life, declared that finding a labor force for the southern states would be inconvenient in the absence of slavery. Thomas Jefferson made known his beliefs that blacks were not equal to colonists in intelligence and courage, proposing that slaves needed to be thoroughly prepared over a period of decades before being declared capable of living as freed persons. When the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, enacted by the recently formed U.S. Congress, ensured the right of slaveholders to claim escaped slaves no matter where or when they might be found, existing perceptions that enslaved people were merely pieces of property were strongly reinforced.

In a bid to weaken or modify the masculine gender roles of enslaved African American men, slaveholders generally fostered the image of slaves as part of the slaveholding family. Referring to the slaves in familial terms—such as “Our Uncle John”—derecognized enslaved men as heads of families. Forcing men to do what would be considered feminine work in a free black family, or even within the slave community, was another tool employed by slaveholders in acting as the primary arbiters of gender roles on their farms. African American men, whether married or not, were forced to have sex with black women in order to guarantee the propagation of the enslaved population. African American women were treated with no less inhumane indifference in being used as breeding stock for the farm or plantation.

One thing slaveholders were unable to change, on the other hand, was the fact that enslaved African Americans brought their own concepts of gender roles to their slave communities. While enslaved men and women submitted to slaveholders' demands with regard to their gendered working roles during the day, the same slaves created their own gender roles within the slave community and away from the eyes of the slaveholders.

Despite American beliefs that slaves were less than human and therefore unable to genuinely feel emotions, much less to value strong family relationships, records in some colonial cities indicate that binding ties to family were paramount in the lives of many enslaved African Americans. Lengthy marriages were maintained, even when husbands or wives were sold to other slaveholders and forced to move hundreds of miles away. Irrespective of the horrific conditions forced upon them, slaves rarely gave up their attempts to keep families intact. African American men and women left behind many stories of heartrending family separations and ongoing searches for wives, husbands, children, sisters, and brothers. In this aspect of African American lives, no gender roles could ameliorate the pain and agony shared by both women and men.

Gender, Economics, and Free Blacks

Slaveholders rarely considered the lives of enslaved African Americans important in a moral or ethical sense; nevertheless, they inevitably recognized that keeping families together was economically sound. The engendering of slave children augmented the labor force and increased profits for the slaveholder. Paltry incentives, such as pieces of clothing, slight additions to food rations, patches of poor ground for tiny gardens, or perhaps time off from field or house labor were routinely offered to enslaved families if they produced babies. Mothers and fathers willingly worked to the point of collapse to bring the smallest rewards to their children and themselves. The policy of manipulating enslaved people in order to increase birthrates, whether by verbal threat, physical prodding, or the enticement of rewards, was hugely successful. In 1808 the U.S. Congress outlawed the importation of slaves into the country; thanks to widely encouraged reproduction, the supply of slaves within the United States was sufficient to feed southern demand for slave labor.

By the early nineteenth century free blacks had established a significant presence in the United States. African Americans had become free through a variety of means: circumstance of birth, the purchase of freedom from slaveholders, conversion to Christianity, escape—often during the chaos of the Revolutionary War—and, rarely, manumission by slaveholders. (In turn, some free blacks became slaveholders—and little record exists to substantiate the notion that slaves received better treatment at the hands of black slaveholders than at those of Anglo-American slaveholders.)

While they certainly could not be sold away from their families, free blacks often had numbers of enslaved relatives. Depending on where they lived, free blacks could be prevented from starting businesses, training for specific occupations, serving on juries, or testifying in court; they often had to obey nighttime curfews. They lived with the fear of being forced into slavery if they traveled to a slave state. They had to cope with the perception among whites that free blacks were troublesome neighborhood residents, as they were often suspected of encouraging enslaved blacks to escape and obtain the certificates of freedom issued by many states. Free black women lived with far more restrictions than free black men, especially with regard to travel and job opportunities. Still, they no longer endured forced daily physical labor and punishments, and they exercised their own reproductive choices, beginning families or not on their own schedules.

Gendered Daily Life

Within enslaved African American families, gender roles tended toward the traditional but often evolved as the family unit changed. Healthy men and women without children not unusually worked in the fields from before dawn until after sundown; every woman with the requisite physical strength was expected to work the same hours as any man. After backbreaking farmwork, the products of the day's labor were counted or weighed; women were lashed for insufficient productivity with the same frequency and duration as men. Meanwhile, men were expected to assume male-gendered routine chores: working into the night hours feeding the farm animals, chopping wood, and carrying water for the slaveholder's home and for the slave quarters. Enslaved women's chores stretched far into the night as well. Acting as housewives, women generally made small fires on dirt floors, fixed meager meals for themselves and their husbands, tended to wounds and injuries from the day's labor, mended clothing, and prepared food scraps for the next day's field lunch.

When enslaved women became pregnant (whether married or not), changes took place in the treatment they received. Aside from getting promised incentives when a healthy baby was born, a future mother saw a gradual shift in her gender role. While she usually continued daily fieldwork, she was not expected to produce as much; as her pregnancy advanced, she probably would be given lighter duties. Upon the birth of her child, the enslaved woman would bear almost all responsibility for child care and rearing and was expected to continue having children as close as possible to every twelve months. Women who failed to bear children were quickly given back to the original slave sellers, with slaveholders typically demanding refunds. (Evidence does not support the notion that the possibility of male infertility was taken into consideration in such cases.)

As long as their mothers were forced to continue daily fieldwork, enslaved babies and children usually spent their time in the care of other pregnant women and the elderly. During preadolescence, children encountered little differentiation due to gender. Clothes were usually meager; boys and girls often dressed in one-piece slip-on sackcloths. Few children or adults wore shoes during either work or play.

Gender differences were more pronounced once children joined labor gangs, which, depending on the development of motor skills, occurred between six and twelve years of age. Children of both genders were required to perform certain duties, such as carrying water, sweeping out animal pens, and weeding gardens. In domestic work, gender played a role in the division of labor: boys were more likely to work specifically for the male slaveholder, while girls learned to sew, knit, cook, and attend to the slaveholder's wife and children.

Once slave children were physically strong enough—usually by puberty—they became adult field hands. Their clothing became gendered, and both sexes entered the same cycle as their parents. On large plantations women found themselves tied to domestic duties throughout childhood, pregnancies, and their elderly years. Men, on the other hand, did not have such restricted gender definition in their corresponding life cycles. Slaves on smaller farms experienced less-defined roles, but women still performed gendered tasks within their home and slave communities. Those communities and their relationships to the Anglo-American world would see many changes in the forthcoming antebellum era.

From the 1830s through the end of the antebellum era, many enslaved African Americans were moved by slaveholders into states in the Deep South. This massive forced migration brought about many societal changes, among them the restructuring of the gender roles of enslaved men and women. As the nationwide ratio of women to men stabilized and the sale of enslaved women and men equalized, slaves' gender roles, while still necessarily flexible, were increasingly defined by the paternalistic attitudes of slaveholders. In other aspects, some enslaved families were already somewhat patriarchal or matriarchal; others were fairly egalitarian in handling daily chores.

As enslaved women bore increasing numbers of children, their roles as mothers added enormously to their burden of labor; women were still expected to work in the fields in addition to acting variously as mother, nurse, nurturer, teacher, housemaid, and wife. Enslaved women's assuming the role of taking care of their families was a boon to slaveholders, as reproduction promised future working slaves and enhanced economic productivity. Thus, in certain respects slaveholders began looking upon enslaved women as equal in value to enslaved men, as long as the women could work in the fields without damaging their ability to bear children.

The lives of African Americans born free in the early Republic, most of whom lived in northern states above the Mason-Dixon Line, contrasted with those of southern enslaved blacks. Still, their lives cannot truly be described as easier than those of their enslaved counterparts; to compare degrees of misery and humiliation would be unreasonable. By the end of the antebellum period approximately 200,000 free African Americans lived in northern cities. Although they were technically free, these women and men were by and large denied suffrage, jobs, and adequate education and had lower incomes and higher mortality rates than all other ethnicities. Free urban black women and men were targets for all manner of assault, including murder. Still, such harsh realities did not fully overshadow the benefits of freedom, however limited. Free African Americans came to build and organize their own schools, churches, literary clubs, relief societies, and antislavery groups. Profoundly important was the fact that free black women could speak publicly about their concerns and were eventually able to muster backing from men as well as other women. Enslaved women and men had no options for such endeavors or expression.

Whether free or enslaved, married or single, most African American women performed some degree of work. The gender roles of free urban black women within both families and the labor force certainly differed from those of enslaved women, but in all cases female participation in the workforce was necessary to ensure the survival of the family. Jobs available to women, all at low wages and usually gender specific, were largely limited to domestic service. Some free women did choose to run businesses from their homes, albeit within gendered confines; they cooked and sold baked goods, ran boarding homes, or created hair salons, for example. The majority of urban black women, however, performed servicerelated work, often in the homes of whites.

Free rural black women were significantly fewer in number. Sometimes rural jobs allowed women to keep their young children with them as they worked, but many free black children became indentured servants or apprentices. These jobs, too, were engendered by the constructs of the white population: boys worked toward becoming tradesmen, while girls studied the trade of the housewife. Freed African American men met with more difficulty in finding work. Long after the Civil War local laws imposed unfair licensing fees on African American craftsmen, and virtually no menial work could be relied upon to be consistent.

Meanwhile, the daily labor of enslaved women and men depended on the type of crops grown and the size of the cropland to be worked. Within the realm of the plantation gender roles may have been either delineated in traditional manners or completely ignored by slaveholders: sometimes men labored in the fields while women performed domestic work; at other times both men and women worked in the fields. Still, where equal labor roles were given to women and men by day, enslaved men and women probably stepped into more traditional gender roles when they found themselves at home at night.

Fighting Back

By the 1850s prominent African Americans, both female and male, were publicly advocating the abolition of slavery and supporting suffrage for at least black men. Many free African Americans joined with white abolitionists to present a united front. In time, enslaved men and women in the Deep South began hearing more about slave escapes and rebellions. They learned of abolitionist activities and the movement toward organized African American religion, and they were certainly aware of slaveholders' increasing paranoia about the possibility of slave uprisings. Previously, the paternalistic, condescending attitudes and racist tenets so deeply held by most slaveholders overshadowed any possible perceived threats; many simply did not believe that the slaves they familiarly referred to as “Auntie,” “Mammy,” or “Uncle” could conceive plots against them. As evidenced in events like Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion, the strength in numbers and the power and cohesiveness of the oppressed black people came as a shock to many slaveholders, especially as enslaved “property” managed to create and execute plans to gain freedom while garnering little attention. The eventually heightened fears of slaveholders were reflected in new laws passed by individual states, further limiting the already tightly structured daily existences of enslaved women and men. Congress's Compromise of 1850 and the Supreme Court's decision in the 1857 Dred Scott case were critical in supporting slaveholders.

In general, gender roles tied women more directly to their owners' lands and their own homes and families, ensuring that enslaved men attempted escape more often than enslaved women. The penalty for escape or rebellion could be death. Enslaved women, while no more afraid of the consequences for themselves than were men, had to consider the fates of their children before deciding whether escape was a realistic option. Still, records testify to various escape attempts by individual women, by entire families, and even by children aided by mothers who stayed behind. For many, the promises of the Underground Railroad, as personified in the abolitionist and conductor Harriet Tubman, were too promising to ignore. The occasional sympathetic whites with the means to aid escapes and the generally unsung free African Americans who became active abolitionists all played parts in escape attempts.

Back on plantations, meanwhile, enslaved women and men who could not or would not escape instead actively undermined slaveholders' authority. As may have been expected, women and men fought back in gendered ways. Enslaved men chose more overt actions: refusing work assignments, being absent for short periods of time before returning, and voluntarily injuring themselves to keep from working. Enslaved women chose subtler, yet equally effective ways to disrupt daily routines. Feigning illnesses, quietly organizing work slowdowns, dropping poison and other harmful ingredients into masters' food and water, setting fires, downing potentially lethal concoctions to cause miscarriages, aiding in abortions, and, in rare cases, choosing to kill their infants rather than add to the enslaved population were strong signals that women, as well as men, were engaged in the fight for freedom.

The Civil War and its aftermath did not prove an instant panacea for enslaved African Americans. Slavery, by then a southern economic mainstay, was not immediately eradicated, and many blacks, though freed, benefited little from the war; choices were so limited that many men and women remained in similar circumstances during and after the war. Many freed men chose to cross Confederate lines to work for and fight with Union troops, often in exchange for no pay, inadequate shelter, scarce food, and little medical care. Some freed women did likewise, working as cooks or as nurses on and off the battlefield, or they mended clothes or carried supplies and ammunition to soldiers on the front lines.

Reconstruction, Racism, and Regression

In the postwar transition, slaveholders fought the idea of completely relinquishing authority over freed African Americans, many of whom never left southern farms. As such, gender roles within slave families solidified in ways impossible under slavery. Healthy young women now had the choice of no longer working in the fields; thus, they could, and frequently did, concentrate their energy on making home as comfortable as possible, supervising the education of their children, and joining other African Americans in supporting church and community efforts, always for the betterment of their own and their children's lives. The one-income family became a reality for many, and the newly created Freedmen's Bureau staunchly supported the concept; men performed field labor, and women took care of the home and family. Still, freedwomen could choose to return to field labor temporarily if necessitated by their family's monetary needs.

The gendering of the daily roles of freed African American men and women would continue. Men entered the political arena, and eventually every state allowed black men to vote, as dictated by the Fifteenth Amendment. In accepting the privilege of voting, black males adopted the gendered roles of nonblack males, part of which was to keep women unseen, unheard, and unacknowledged, whatever their ethnicity. No women had voting rights, so women played no public role in formal political processes. In creating legitimate African American religious denominations, it was freedmen who were placed in positions of power and leadership and who determined that freed African American women could speak only within their communities and inside structured religious groups. Nevertheless, within the public realm women made political statements by throwing off slave garments and choosing to dress in the styles of the time—styles formerly worn only by white women. Individual female African Americans paid a severe price for their prominent independence, as incidents of horrific violence against African American women increased. The Ku Klux Klan, established in the South in 1868, surely played a part, but attacks were mainly perpetrated by racist whites with no Klan affiliation. Post–Civil War Reconstruction was marked by violence against free black women as in no other period in U.S. history.

Through the end of the nineteenth century, life for many freed African American women and men in the rural South remained uncomfortably similar to slave life. Their workdays and duties changed very little. Their family structures and gender roles were much the same, and the gap between the relative freedoms of black men and women only widened. However, the one change that would prove invaluable was the mere hope held by all African Americans for better lives for their children. Freed blacks were the parents of those who would make up early-twentieth-century migrations to northern and western cities and beyond, searching for the rights to equality, education, and lives of abundance denied to their enslaved ancestors.

See also Black Codes and Slave Codes, Colonial; Black Family; Childhood; Clothing; Economic Life; Feminist Movement; Free African Americans to 1828; Free African Americans before the Civil War (North); Free African Americans before the Civil War (South); Hair and Beauty Culture; Identity; Marriage, Mixed; Masculinity; Midwifery; Occupations; Old Age; Sexuality; Slave Narratives; Stereotypes of African Americans; Suffrage, Women's; Violence against African Americans; Voting Rights; Women; and Work.

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