Critical review of Deborah Gray White

Black women were cheated out of their identity in American history, they have been neglected by historians, and they retain to be treated as second-class citizens today: " despite any that she has come through and accomplished, the American downhearted cleaning lady is still waiting for an affirmative answer to the plaintive headway asked over a century ago: `Ar'n't I a woman?'" (167).

It is a relatively short (167 pages) book entirely it is powerful nevertheless, because it deals less with social data and theory than with the sorrowful and enraging stories of specific female slaves in specific circumstances. White takes rise advantage of the available man-made lakes in trying to awaken the reader to the reality of female slaves, but she first notes the difficulties facing every researcher seeking the complete story of these women: " . . . the dearth of witness corporal makes documenting their real role difficult" (22). In addition, the material which is available is contradictory:

In short, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to be precise about the effect of any single unsettled on female slaves. . . . It is very difficult to find source material about slave women in failicular. Slave women were everywhere, thus far nowhere (23).

Admittedly, then, White must rely in part on "inferences" from the available source material,

unfit for all but the most rudimentary genteelness (118).

White is sure-fire in not only show that female slaves die harded under slavery, but she also makes clear that they go along to suffer "for over seventy-five years after independence" (163). Her book, in this area as in others, is consistently successful in connecting the past and the present: "To this day the add up of obscure women in the live on force is proportionately higher than the number of white women" (163).

When . . . Southerners were forced to justify slavery . . . they adjusted their mentation to make slavery a positive good. . . . The image of Jezebel pardon miscegenation, the sexual exploitation of black women, and the mulatto population. . . . The Mammy image . . .

helped plunk for the service of black women in Southern households. . . . Together, Jezebel and Mammy did a lot of explaining and soothed many a troubled conscience (61).

The snip is readable as headspring because she smoothly blends the stories of individual slaves and the sociological "big picture" of slavery in terms of its squeeze on the existence of female slaves in general. She is successful in showing how slavery hurt female slaves as well as the entire black family. And finally, she shows how the experience of slavery for black women completely refutes the argument that women are inferior to men---and argument which is apply to discriminate against women, both black and white, to this day.

All women were overwhelmed by work [which was] hard, mundane, repetitive, and unrewarding. Slave and free women alike had no visible cover over reproduction. . . . Relative to white men all women were low-powered and exploited. The powerlessness and exploitation of black women was an extreme form of what all women experienced because . . . slave women suffered from the malevolence that flowed from both racism and sexism (162).

If women in general suffer from social, economic and political prejudice, female slaves suffer even more.
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