21. 1500-1600 Gender, Sexuality, and the Slave Trade 

 The beginning of the slave trade and the events that followed are some of the darkest parts of human history. Women were just as included in these events and their own histories and traumas go under looked. The lives of the women in this time span from those of slaves to those of African Amazons that fought back against the slave trade. 

Wikimedia Commons

The slave trade is perhaps the most horrific disgrace in the history of the human race. Human beings have been enslaved as far back as one can trace history, but the slave trade that emerged after the discovery of the Americas resulted in triangle trade: enslaved people came from Africa to work land in America, crops from America were sent to Europe, and Europeans sent finished manufactured products back to Africa and the Americas. The encounters between African people and the European enslavers that landed on their shores are important to understanding the modern social, political, and economic landscape. But often lost in conversations about slavery are the way that enslaved women were often sexualized. Some historians argue that sexuality should be at the center of any study of slavery in the Americas. This includes emotional and physical practices around reproduction, intimate expression, love, and sex used as a form of oppression. Slavery was as much about power as it was about economics, and enslaved women trapped in this horrific dynamic were subjected to sexual violence in addition to physical violence. Despite this, women affected by European involvement in West Africa were able to demonstrate incredible autonomy and resistance.

---

Wikimedia Commons

Early Contact with African Women
West African women were productive members of their communities serving as agriculturalists, spinners and weavers, and merchants. African women could transcend gender norms in extreme cases. There is significant evidence that women were allowed to make ample contributions to the social, political and economic structure of their societies in pre-colonial Africa, if not with the same influence as men. Where they were prevented from being openly active, women used loopholes inherent in their social structures to gain and maintain some level of power. Unfortunately, this power did change to a large extent with the arrival of monotheism either through spreading Christianity or Islam, or the arrival of Europeans, causing women to suffer important setbacks.

Europeans had long made contact with coastal Africans. The Portuguese in the early 1400s had proved it was possible to sail around the Horn of Africa to reach the spices of India. (Yet, sadly, proved it was impossible to simply pass by the continent without stopping to wreak havoc on it.) In the subsequent trips European men made, they built relationships with, stayed with, and were hosted by trading partners and women, and sadly, didn’t stop at the trading of spices. Slavery was common throughout Africa; in fact it was African enslavers who sold the slaves to the Europeans to be transported to the horrific conditions in the Americas. In Africa the enslaved were similar to the serfs of Europe. They had rights, which were not extended when they were taken to the Americas. 

In Angola, Nzinga is an important example of women wielding extraordinary power in African history. She ruled as a monarch in the early 1600s;  however, her people were subjected to humiliation under the Portuguese. Her territory, Ndongo, had to reposition itself as a middle-man in trade to avoid her people becoming part of the supply in the slave trade. She allied Ndongo with Portugal, simultaneously acquiring a partner in its fight against its African enemies and ending Portuguese slave raiding in the kingdom. Ana Nzinga’s baptism, with the Portuguese colonial governor serving as godfather, sealed this relationship. However, by 1626, Portugal had betrayed Ndongo; Portugal–and Nzinga was forced to flee with her people further west, where they founded a new state at Matamba, well beyond the reach of the Portuguese. To bolster Matamba’s martial power, Nzinga offered sanctuary to runaway slaves and Portuguese-trained African soldiers and adopted a form of military organization known as kilombo, in which youths renounced family ties and were raised communally in militias. Nzinga found an ally in the Netherlands, which seized the port of Luanda for its own mercantile purposes in 1641. Their combined forces were insufficient to drive the Portuguese out of Angola, however, and after Luanda was reclaimed by the Portuguese, Nzinga was again forced to retreat to Matamba. From this point on, Nzinga focused on developing Matamba as a trading power by capitalizing on its position as the gateway to the Central African interior. By the time of her death in 1663, Matamba was a formidable commercial state that dealt with the Portuguese colony on an equal footing. ​

---

Wikimedia Commons

What the many other women thought of these European men in their communities is lost to history. But we do know what European men thought of African women. Their early accounts of African women demonstrate how quickly the sexualizing of these “exotic” African women began. 

The earliest European travelers to Africa noted the differences between African women, describing the different tones of their skin from tawny, to black, to “perfectly Black.” In the late 1640s a man named Richard Ligon met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, the concubine of a Portuguese man who had settled on the Cape Verde islands. Of her he said, “her eyes were the richest jewels, for they were the largest, and most oriental I have ever seen… [she had] far greater majesty, and gracefulness than I have seen [in] Queen Anne.” Similarly, James Bruce described how he had always found fair complexions to be the most attractive, but had to admit that African women were so lovely. He decided that, “almost all of the beauty consists in elegance of figure, in the finest and polish of the skin, in grace of movement, and the expression of the countenance.” Travel letters from France will describe how 'easy-going' African women were and how 'eager to please' European men they were. Pervy poet Thomas Gray posited that between white and black skin, he preferred the lovely soft breasts of black women. 

But along with these “compliments” came emerging stereotypes about African women’s strength and reproductive capacity. European writers, after witnessing African women working and hearing stories of them birthing children came to find European women frustratingly weak. Pieter de Marees wrote in 1602, “The women here are of the cruder nature and a stronger posture than the females in our lands in Europe.“ He and others described African “savagery” and the natural way in which women gave birth. Of course, it was to the advantage of slave traders to describe African people as beautiful, natural, and more rugged than their European counterparts, because they were after all there to buy these people and take them into bondage. They couldn’t describe them as what they likely were: dirty, ill, and traumatized. 

Richard Ligon, who had originally described African women as the most beautiful he’d ever seen, changed his views as the slave trade was taking off and began to describe African women as animals, unnatural, disproportionate, all while describing in detail these women’s private parts, an example of what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. By the early 1700s, some European male writers began to find mixed race Africans abhorrent. The over-sexualization and dehumanization of African women was another link in the long chain of convenient excuses used to explain the slave trade.

Regardless of this transition, the men who came would go on to have many sexual encounters with African women. They participated in public prostitution, private prostitution, and concubinage. Public prostitutes were enslaved and had been assigned sex work. They did not choose their work and did receive pensions when they retired. They commonly suffered from sexually transmitted disease. Their work was described by one historian as forced public service by providing unmarried men with sex because it was commonly believed these rouges were so sex craved they would have sex with other men’s wives. ​

---

Private prostitutes were more like house servants who were obedient to prostitution. Commonly, within West African societies male sexual needs always took precedence over female ones. Ordinary European sailors probably hired prostitutes, but elite male travelers were likely provided female company by their male African host when they arrived. 
Many women living in these port cities were enslaved. The most common occupation for these women was in hospitality and prostitution. Often as part of trading deals, African men would offer their enslaved women to the European men. As noted before, European men would describe how much stronger, healthier, and able these African women were than the European women they knew back home. Some European men came to prefer African women. It was a fine line between admiration and exploitation recorded over and over again in their writing. 
Transition: A world away, in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the Americas, the mistreatment, murder, and diseases inflicted upon the indigenous populations there had a devastating effect. Some estimate that 90% of the population died. Aside from the horrific human cost, this presented an economic predicament for those settling and establishing plantations. Who would help “civilize” and work the land? They sought enslaved people that were immune to these diseases and would therefore provide a more stable workforce. This led to the importation of African slaves from the robust slave trading networks they had already established.

The growth of the transatlantic slave trade was gradual, hitting 30,000 Africans crossing the Atlantic annually by 1690. Of the women migrating (notably forced) to the Americas from Afro-Eurasia, 4 out of 5 of them were African. This massive assault on African populations led some women to take matters into their own hands.

Middle Passage: Perhaps a worse fate from being a prostitute was to be one of the poor souls sent on the Middle Passage to the Americas as part of the transatlantic slave trade. The entire process was designed to strip the enslaved of their personhood, and for women, their womanhood. The enslaved were packed below decks in dank spaces barely big enough for their bodies, most were unable to crane their necks or expand their shoulders. Chained to other humans in these cramped conditions for months on end without adequate food, clean water, and basic sanitation, they festered in their own excrement and became horribly sick, and many died. On one occasion, the sailors heard such a loud commotion below decks and opened the hatches to find the enslaved in different stages of suffocation, battling one another for air; many were already dead.

In addition to these threats, enslaved women and girls also faced sexual abuses: rape by captors and crews. Pregnant women on board often died from malnutrition or inadequate medical attention. Even if they did survive labor, their babies rarely made it in these conditions. Mothers struggled twice as hard to not only protect themselves, but also their children. 

Surviving the journey did not mean the horrors were over. The enslaved were stripped and taken to market, to be manhandled and often separated from their children. From there, the enslaved journeyed into unknown lands, with unknown customs, to labor in the hardest conditions on earth.
 
Sugar Plantation Life
Affy was an enslaved  Jamaican woman born in 1767 who lived to see emancipation in 1834 at age 66, making her a decently old person for that time. Everything that we know about Affy comes from the records on the plantation where she worked. She started work at the age of seven growing sugar, which is what the Caribbean islands primarily produced. 85% of adult women did this kind of work, and it was considered the most onerous and backbreaking of all the work done on the sugar plantations.  In her life she had four black and two mixed race children. The black children worked in the fields, while the fate of the two mixed race children was not recorded. She had two daughters who died in adulthood at 26 and 41, which were much more typical lifetimes for enslaved women. At the age of 31, Affy was considered weak in the inventory and was removed from fieldwork and sent to be a washerwoman, nanny, and seamstress. At the age of 57 she was considered an invalid, and then finally she was considered “worthless“ by her employers. 
​
Enslaved people who lived and worked on the sugar plantations were treated viciously, and historians regularly lament the immorality they experienced. One historian said enslavers “worked their enslaved people so hard and were so little concerned about how the enslaved people coped.“ At the same time, enslavers were clearly conscious of how the work was affecting the enslaved population because they kept meticulous details on their state of being and became increasingly more precise in calculating their value at the market. The plantation owners put both men and women out in the most labor-intensive work, and given the emphasis on productivity, this shows that there was no gender difference in their ability to produce crops and work hard. They divided the enslaved by physical capacity, not by sex. So while gender division existed for the white and free population, for the enslaved, there was no such thing as “women’s work.“ But one interesting caveat is that enslaved females were consistently priced lower than enslaved male at the market. This is probably because women were never promoted to drivers or taught a trade, so women perpetually worked in the fields, where their value remained stagnant. Even when women did the bulk of the physically demanding work, gendered attitudes from outside the plantations impacted the way their work was perceived. Enslavers automatically assumed that the work men did was more valuable, and therefore belittled fieldwork as unmanly. ​

---

Lack of Bodily Integrity
Sexual exploitation of enslaved women was common, and yet the exploitation before the abolition of the slave trade was not intended to produce children. Women were returned to the field 1 to 2 weeks after giving birth, making it impossible for the mothers to properly care and nurture their infant children, leading to high infant mortality rates. Planters also seemed unaffected when enslaved women exercised bodily autonomy and demonstrated defiance by having abortions. In short, planters greatly preferred women not to become pregnant because it decreased women’s productive potential. Planters valued the enslaved population for their “productive” rather than their “re-productive potential.”

Enslaved men were given positions of authority in the slave community, establishing patriarchal dominance and giving enslaved men power over enslaved women. But white men would continually undercut black male dominance over the women. White men on these plantations were afraid of black men who outnumbered them by huge margins and were consistently stoic under torture and horrible work conditions. Part of the psychological warfare inflicted by enslavers upon these black men was having sexual relations with black women to remind them who was really in charge. In fact, most of the instances of black male slaves fighting back against the planters was when the planters interrupted the marital relations of the enslaved community. 

Early marriage laws in North America show the attempts to segregate indigenous and African people in ways not mirrored in South America. These early laws show the ways in which female autonomy over their bodies was limited, regardless of their race, but also highlight how Black women faced a double burden under law. One early Virginia law upended centuries of common law in Europe and placed the status of children under the mother rather than the father. It stated that if your mother was enslaved, you would be too. Enslaved women would perpetuate slavery as all of their offspring, regardless of the status of the father, would be enslaved. This was an open ticket for masters to have sexual relations with them, for if an enslaved woman produced a child, it would provide more slaves for the plantation. Certainly not all white plantation owners were rapists. Many of them pursued breeding their female slaves by pairing them with male slaves. . 

Free women, mostly white, who gave birth to a mixed race baby would be charged a fine for indecency, but their baby would be free like them. Letty Ogleton of Maryland petitioned for freedom for herself and her five children because she believed she was “entitled to their freedom having linearly descended from a free woman.“ Cases of this nature sprinkled throughout the court records of early America. Freedom was determined by whether your mother was white or black. Blackness became synonymous with slavery.

Enslavers had the ability to sell mothers away from their children, force mothers to return to work before their babies were weaned off of breast milk, and discipline the mothers’ children. In a structure like this, enslaved women found a little room for bodily or mental autonomy. Despite all the horrors of slave life, we have examples of  women who resisted, still managed to find joy, and persevered.
​

---

African Amazons
At the peak of Atlantic trade, many regions of West Africa were facing the unbearable consequences of their own regional conflicts and European incursions. Populations struggled to keep up with harvests and planting; groups raided, kidnapped, and extorted members from rival and surrounding tribes to slave traders; and more. Individual armies were greatly weakened by the fact that men were lost to local and international conflicts, or forcibly sold off, which only left a nation at greater risk.

The Kingdom of Dahomey, modern-day Benin, faced all of these pressures, and responded by bolstering their ranks with an all-female regiment. Now, the Dahomey are not without controversy. Like some other African kingdoms, they captured and sold those around them into slavery to preserve their own people, traded people for European goods, and were said to practice human sacrifice. We cannot claim this, nor any other, nation was without horrific, dark corners in their history, but we can look at them as a primary example in female militarism. 

The first to recruit women was King Houegbadja in the mid-17th century when he allowed his daughter, the later Queen Hangbe, to form a female bodyguard for the king. Her brother would later use these female warriors offensively in war with surrounding tribes. Upon their successful participation in war, their ranks, prestige, and power grew. Soon, girls as young as eight were beginning training for a lifetime of military service, and thousands at a time would be serving. 

The female presence in their military would remain a century later when Western observers got their first look at the group they would name the Dahomey Amazons, based on the women warriors of ancient lore. They were not to marry or have children, except maybe with the king, but were to dedicate their lives to military service. These Western observers wrote of how women were recruited if they had aggressive traits and could even be involuntarily recruited if their husbands or fathers claimed they were uncontrollable, and from there they would be put to the same physical rigors, discipline standards, and requirements of the male soldiers. English naval officer Frederick Forbes wrote of the Dahomean soldiers, “Male and female emulate each other: what the males do, the Amazons will endeavour to surpass.” 

At times, thousands of them served their tribe, forming up to a third of the army’s total, and faced almost no major military losses until the region was eventually overrun by the technologically superior French in a series of wars in the 19th Century. As noted, however, what the Dahomey did with their military power can easily be dissected to be just as destructive as it was revolutionary. The French forces would face the Dahomey in two separate wars, and in both, the Amazons were reported to have engaged them with rifles, swords, and in hand-to-hand combat before being ultimately defeated. 
​
Conclusion: Women’s sexuality was at the center of the dynamics between the enslavers and the enslaved. Despite the horrors of slavery, women found agency, resisted, and found ways to endure. Women physically fought against their enslavement like the Dahomey and Nzinga, even if it would not stall the flow of slavery itself. 
[Setting up the Inquiry] By the end of this era, so much remained in question. Could the Americas recover from this disgrace in their history? How did African women find bodily integrity against such incredible odds? 

---

BACK

NEXT

Draw your own conclusions

Learn how to teach with inquiry.

Power Point for Teachers

Include the basics in what you already teach.

Bibliography

Berry, Diana R. and Leslie M. Harris, Ed. Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018).

Miles, Rosalind. The Women’s History of the World. London, UK: Harper Collins Publishers, 1988.

​Mintz, Steven. “Historical Context: Facts about the Slave Trade and Slavery.” Gilder Lehrman Institute. 
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teaching-resource/historical-context-facts-about-slave-trade-and-slavery#:~:text=The%20volume%20of%20slaves%20carried,leaving%20Africa%20in%20slave%20ships. 

​​Strayer, R. and Nelson, E., Ways Of The World. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016.

Primary AUTHOR:

Kelsie Brook Eckert

Primary Reviewer:

Jacqui Nelson

Consulting Team

Editors

Kelsie Brook Eckert, Project Director
Coordinator of Social Studies Education at Plymouth State University

Dr. Nancy Locklin-Sofer, Consultant
Professor of History at Maryville University. 

Chloe Gardner, Consultant
PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at Edinburgh University

Dr. Whitney Howarth, Consultant
Former Professor of History at Plymouth State University

Jacqui Nelson, Consultant
Teaching Lecturer of Military History at Plymouth State University

​Maria Concepcion Marquez Sandoval
PhD Candidate in History at Arizona University

Amy Flanders
Humanities Teacher, Moultonborough Academy
Ron Kaiser
Humanities Teacher, Moultonborough Academy
Chris Canfield
Humanities Teacher, Moultonborough Academy

Reviewers

Ancient:
Dr. Kristin Heineman
Professor of History at Colorado State University
Dr. Bonnie Rock-McCutcheon
Professor of History at Wilson College
Sarah Stone
PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at Edinburgh University
Medieval:
Dr. Katherine Koh
Professor of History at La Sierra University
Dr. Jonathan Couser
Professor of History at Plymouth State University
Dr. Shahla Haeri
Professor of History at Boston University 
Lauren Cole
PhD Candidate in History at Northwestern University
Modern:
Dr. Jack Gronau
Professor of History at Northeastern University