That the Antebellum Southern belle, long-mythologised as a wisp of delicate submission and refined piety, could bear witness and contribute to the barbarities of slavery seems unfathomable. Many scholars have, in fact, been loath to consider it.
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This essay, however, adopts a position favored by more recent works in arguing that white women were slave mistresses in fullest sense of the word, whose relationships to enslaved persons were primarily those of power and property, where their own privileged statuses depended upon the other's oppression. Firstly, I summarize prior scholarship and outline how this essay departs from their methodology.
I then focus on mistresses’ economic involvement in slavery, deconstructing the notion of slave ownership and mastery as masculine or patriarchal. I then outline the gendered ways in which white women exploited enslaved bodies, both for reproductive labor and sexual purposes. Finally, I consider the reasons why mistresses upheld a system that contributed to their own oppression, but also why many contemporary scholars have difficulty believing they did.
When not entirely ignoring their role within the ‘peculiar institution,’ twentieth-century scholars generally depicted white mistresses as benevolent ‘closet-abolitionist’ figures whose oppression under the Southern patriarchy they often equated with the sufferings of (particularly female) slaves.
Marli F. Weiner argues that Southern paternalism tasked white women with providing slaves both material and moral ‘care and guidance’ (that is, attending to enslaved people’s bodily needs and spiritual health), a responsibility most taken seriously. She concludes that this resulted in some mistresses empathizing with their slaves in ‘radical’ ways, humanizing an inhuman institution. Vera Lynn Kennedy similarly argues that ‘shared female experiences’ such as childbirth and motherhood brought mistresses and slaves together with ‘subversive, even radical implications.’
Even more recent scholars who are more knowledgeable of white women’s complicity in slavery espoused similar rhetoric. For example, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese admits that mistresses were often ‘more crudely racist’ than masters and shared little sisterly solidarity with female slaves. Immediately however, she undercuts this by rhapsodising about the ‘genuine personal concern and grief’ mistresses felt for slaves in a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to depict them complexly.
Mistresses’ personal writings (which the most famous use extensively and almost exclusively) do reveal that many considered their relationships with slaves as mutually loyal and affectionate. But as bell hooks writes, allowing privileged persons like slaveholding women to interpret ‘the reality of…a less powerful, exploited and oppressed group’ such as their slaves is problematic for obvious reasons. If one instead uses evidence from slave narratives and the testimonies of former slaves, mistresses emerge (in striking contrast to their self-characterisations) as calculating, authoritative and occasionally tyrannical figures. For these reasons, I too prioritise sources that allow the enslaved to define their own realities, against which I critically compare mistresses’ claims.