According to former slave Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), “The slave girl is raised in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear. The lash and the foul talk of her master and his sons are her teachers.
When she is fourteen or fifteen, her owner of her, or his sons of her, or the overseer of her, or perhaps all of them, begin to bribe her with gifts. If these fail to accomplish their purpose, she is whipped and starved into submission to their will.” Jacobs’ account of the sexual violence endured by slave women is merely one of many. Although it is impossible to know exactly how many black women were sexually assaulted under slavery, such abuse was widespread.
Not all sexual encounters between masters and female slaves would be considered rape according to most definitions of the term.1 Concubinage-type arrangements and even long-term romantic partnerships, perhaps most famously that of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, were known to exist. Yet, many scholars would agree that “even presumably affectionate and long-term relationships must be reconsidered given the context of slavery” (Foster, 2011, p. 459). The enormous imbalance of gender and racial power between the two parties problematizes the notion of a truly consensual romantic relationship between a slave master and his female slave. These so-called consensual sexual partnerships can be seen, like rape, as an exercise in white patriarchal authority.
Why these women chose to sexually abuse slaves probably varied by situation. Perhaps some of them were simply bored or sexually frustrated. But perhaps, at least on a subconscious level, sexually exploiting slaves was a means of compensating for their lack of power in other aspects of their lives.
But what of sexual relations between planter-class white women and slave men? Under what conditions did they occur? How should they be described in terms of power, agency, and consent? Answering these questions involves analyzing historical records through the lens of power relations, parsing through the complexities of racial, class, and gender hierarchies. By “focusing attention on the ways that multiple and sometimes conflicting sources of oppression and power are intertwined,” such an intersectional analysis allows us to make sense of how persons occupying a position of low-status in one social arena can simultaneously occupy one of high -status in another (Aulette, Wittner, and Blakely, 2009, p. 5). They also allow us to observe the processes by which social hierarchies are sustained. In the case of white women and black men, we can use an intersectional analysis to better understand the ways in which elite Southern white women used oppressive, gendered notions of female purity and sexual subservience to maintain racial hierarchy.
“Prisoners in Disguise”
As guardians of the home, planter-class white women were responsible for upholding traditional Christian values and keeping peace within the domestic sphere. As such, they were valued for their homemaking abilities, maternal instinct, and, perhaps above all else, their virtue. As one letter to a South Carolinian periodical geared toward young women put it,