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

The beginning of the transatlantic slave trade and the events that followed are some of the darkest parts of human history. The enslavement of people across history is a horrific disgrace, and the size and scope of African slave trade in the 16th and 17th century was staggering. It touched the lives of millions of women - from those who were enslaved, to those who fought against it, and those who supported and participated in it.
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Trigger Warning: This chapter references rape and sexual assault. 

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Human beings have been enslaved as far back as one can trace history. The transatlantic slave trade that emerged after the discovery of the Americas resulted in what has been called the triangular trade. Enslaved people were taken from Africa to work land in America, crops from America were sent to Europe, and Europeans sent finished manufactured products to Africa and the Americas in exchange for money and materials. 

Triangular Trade, Public Domain

The encounters between African people and the European enslavers who landed on their shores are important to understanding the modern social, political, and economic landscape. Often lost in conversations about slavery are the ways that enslaved women were sexually exploited. Some historians argue that sexuality should be at the center of any study of slavery in the Americas and Africa. This includes emotional and physical practices around reproduction, intimate expression, love, and sex. 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 demonstrated incredible autonomy and resistance. 

Autonomy (n.), the right or condition of self-government or self-control. ​

Sugar Plantation, Manchester Art Museum

Early Contact with African WomenWest African women worked as agriculturalists, spinners and weavers, and merchants in their societies. 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. Women’s secret societies, titled societies, spiritual roles, and their status as elders in the community - which increased with marriage and age - were some of the ways in which women exerted influence and power. However, women’s power diminished with the arrival of monotheism through spreading Christianity or Islam, causing women to suffer important setbacks.

The Age of Discovery caused a dramatic increase in interaction, but 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. In the subsequent trips, European men built relationships with, stayed with, and were hosted by trading partners along the African coastline. Slavery was common throughout Africa, and in fact, it was African enslavers who sold the slaves to the Europeans to be transported to horrific conditions in the Americas. In Africa, the enslaved were similar to the serfs of Europe. They had rights within Africa, but these were not extended when they were taken to the Americas. 

What African 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 physical characteristics of 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 said he had 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 upon seeing African women, 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.” Similar travel letters from France describe how “easy-going” African women were and how “eager to please” European men they were. 

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 without great help or duress, began to elaborate myths about African women’s strength and ability to endure pain. 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 there to buy these people and sell them for profit.

As the slave trade was consolidated, early respect and admiration turned to racist stereotyping of African women’s degraded sexuality and physical strength. Richard Ligon, who had originally described African women as the most beautiful he had ever seen, changed his views as the slave trade began. He then described African women as animals, unnatural, and disproportionate, all while describing in detail these women’s private parts. By the early 1700s, some European male writers began to find mixed race Africans abhorrent, even as mixed race individuals often emerged out of unequal relations between European men and African women.

As Europeans became dominant powers on the African coasts, many African women were forced either through enslavement or circumstances into public prostitution, private prostitution, and concubinage. Public prostitutes were enslaved and were assigned sex work. They sometimes received pensions when they retired, but they commonly suffered from sexually transmitted diseases. Private prostitutes were more like house servants. Ordinary European sailors probably hired public prostitutes, but elite male travelers were likely provided female company through private prostitutes by their male colonial or African host when they arrived. 
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Queen Njinga Mbande, Public Domain

African Defiance
In Angola, Queen Njinga provides an important example of women wielding extraordinary power in African history. Njinga Ana da Sousa Mbande lived and ruled in what is now northern Angola in West Central Africa. She was the queen of the Ambundu Kingdoms of Ndongo (1624–1663) and Matamba (1631–1663). Coming to power after the suicide of her brother who feared the Portuguese, she repositioned her territory, Ndongo, as a middleman in trade to avoid her people becoming part of the supply in the slave trade. She allied Ndongo with Portugal, which simultaneously gave Portugal a partner in its fight against its African enemies and ended  the Portuguese slave trade in her kingdom. Njinga’s baptism, with the Portuguese colonial governor serving as godfather, sealed this relationship.

However, by 1626, Portugal had betrayed Ndongo and Njinga 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, Njinga offered sanctuary to runaway slaves and Portuguese-trained African soldiers. She adopted a form of military organization known as kilombo, in which youths renounced family ties and were raised communally in militias. Njinga 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, Njinga was again forced to retreat to Matamba. She then focused on developing Matamba as a trading power by capitalizing on its position as the gateway to the Central African interior. At her death in 1663, Matamba was a formidable commercial state that dealt with the Portuguese colony on an equal footing. ​Despite being engaged in the slave trade, she is remembered as an iconic and heroic leader who protected her people, fought off the Portuguese, and eluded capture. 

At the peak of Atlantic trade, many regions of West Africa faced the unbearable consequences of both regional conflicts and European incursions. Populations struggled to keep up with harvests and planting, and thus groups raided, kidnapped, and sold members from rival and surrounding societies to slave traders for survival, as Njinga had done. Individual armies were weakened by the loss of men to local and international conflicts or were forcibly sold, which only left nations at greater risk.

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​The Kingdom of Dahomey, in modern-day Benin, faced all of these pressures and responded by bolstering their ranks with an all-female regiment in the 18th century. The first to recruit women was King Houegbadja in the mid-17th century when he allowed his daughter, later Queen Hangbe, to form a female bodyguard for the king. Her brother later used these female warriors offensively in war with surrounding societies. On 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 served at a time.
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The female presence in their military remained 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 permitted to marry or have children, except maybe with the king, but were expected to dedicate their lives to military service. The 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. 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,
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     “Male and female emulate each other: what the males do, the Amazons will endeavour to                  surpass.” 

Rigors (n.), demanding, difficult, or extreme conditions.

The Dahomey Amazons marching to war, Public Domain

At times, thousands of them served their tribe, forming up to a third of the army’s total population. They 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. What the Dahomey did with their military power can be considered as destructive as it was revolutionary. The French forces faced 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. 

In some ways, Njinga’s resistance would be too little (in number, but not in spirit), and the Dahomey Amazons, too late. Ultimately, neither actively tried to prevent the slave trade itself, only to protect their own people from it. Given what we know about the European hunger for slave labor, that was not a matter of selfishness, but survival. 
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Middle Passage
Once an individual was captured for enslavement, they could spend days, weeks, or months in African coastal cities before being transported to the Americas. This was merely the first step in the middle passage of the transatlantic slave trade; the whole of which was designed to strip the enslaved of their personhood. The enslaved were packed below decks in dank spaces barely big enough for their bodies, where most were unable to crane their necks or expand their shoulders. There they remained 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. Many died from disease, malnutrition, exposure, violence, and even suffocation. 

Excrement (n.), feces.

Diagram of a multi-decked slave ship and enslaved people chained shoulder-to-shoulder, lying flat, Public Domain

Women were sometimes treated differently during transport, even at times being left unchained and within proximity of weapons due to the belief that they did not pose a threat in the way that men did.  Sometimes they were spared the cramped, disease ridden spaces below deck in order to entertain the European enslavers above deck. There, though, enslaved women and girls faced sexual abuse and rape by captors and crews. Mothers struggled not only to protect themselves but also to keep their children alive, while pregnant women on board often died from malnutrition or inadequate medical attention. Even if they did survive labor, their babies rarely survived in these conditions. 

Given the horrors of the middle passage, it is no wonder the enslaved rebelled, despite the power difference. Quantitative historians have found that one-in-ten of the more than 36,000 ships that crossed the middle passage in a four year period had a slave insurrection on board. The only relevant correlation they could find for why these rebellions occurred was that the more women there were on board, the more likely a rebellion. In 1776, one enslaver aboard the Thames noted, 

     For your safety as well as mine [...] You’ll have       the needful guard over your Slaves, and put not         too much confidence in the Women nor                     Children lest they happen to be instrumental in         your being surprised which may be fatal. 

The ship’s log for a much later ship, the Thomas, in 1797, stated,

      two or three of the female slaves have they discovered that the armorer had incautiously left the arms chest open [...]        conveyed all the arms, which they could find, through the bulkhead to the male slaves, about 200 of them                          immediately ran up the forescuttles and put to death all the crew who came in their way.

Undoubtedly, these women used the enslavers’ underestimation against them. While these are moments where such resistance may have proven fruitful, attempts at resistance were almost always met with failure, increased violence, and even death.
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The growth of the transatlantic slave trade was gradual, with as many as 30,000 Africans crossing the Atlantic annually by 1690. Of the women who sailed to the Americas from Afro-Eurasia, four out of five of them were African. This massive assault on African populations led some women to take matters into their own hands. Suicide was not uncommon among captured Africans headed for the slave ships.

The middle passage ended upon arrival in the Americas, when the enslaved were taken to market in any number of Caribbean or coastal trading cities from Brazil to Boston. Most were removed from their transport ship, stripped, washed, and immediately sold within the harbor. In the process of the sale, they were often manhandled and separated from their children, parents, spouses, siblings, and more. From there, the enslaved journeyed into unknown lands, with unknown customs, to labor in some of the hardest conditions on earth.

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A slave auction, Public Domain

A sugarcane plantation, Public Domain

​The Americas 
Around three-quarters of the enslaved Africans forced to come to the Americas remained in the Caribbean and South America. The vast majority were to labor on sugar plantations; a driving industry of the region. Enslaved people who lived and worked on the sugar plantations were treated viciously, and historians regularly lament their work and living conditions. There was little concern for the slaves’ wellbeing; the only concern being their ability to continue to labor and produce a profit. At the same time, enslavers were clearly conscious of how the work was affecting the enslaved population because they kept meticulous details on their condition. These records became increasingly more precise in calculating the market value of enslaved people.
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One example is Affy, an enslaved Jamaican woman born in 1767 who lived to see emancipation in 1834 at age 66, making her an old person for her time. Everything we know about Affy comes from the records on the plantation where she was enslaved. She started work at the age of seven, growing sugar. 85% of enslaved 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 latter children are evidence of rape or a coerced sexual relationship with either her owner, or another white man. The Black children, both daughters, worked in the fields, and died in adulthood at 26 and 41, which was typical of enslaved women. The fate of the two mixed race children was not recorded. At the age of 31, Affy was considered weak 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. 
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Invalid (n.), a person made weak or disabled by illness or injury.

Inside a building used for boiling sugarcane, Public Domain

Plantation owners made both men and women do labor-intensive work. Given the emphasis on productivity, the records show that there was little-to-no gender difference in their ability to produce crops and work hard. They divided the enslaved by physical capacity, not by sex.

​While gender division existed for the white and free population, for the enslaved, there was no such thing as “women’s work.“ Yet, 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. ​Thus, enslaved females were consistently priced lower than enslaved males at the market. Women perpetually worked in the fields, where their value remained stagnant.

Slavery met resistance every step of the way, even if such resistance was not enough to bring the practice to an end until much later. One of the greatest acts of resistance came from the Maroons in Jamaica. The Maroons were enslaved peoples who had fled into the rugged interior of Jamaica and formed a series of communities. They protected themselves from colonial forces that sought to trap escaped slaves and built a thriving agricultural community. As their numbers and protection grew, they became more comfortable interacting with Indigenous populations and even trading with or raiding colonial villages for supplies and to free more slaves.
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Queen Nanny depicted on modern Jamaican currency, Public Domain

One of the most famous leaders of the Maroons was Queen Nanny. The stories of Queen Nanny are often conflicting as they rely not only largely on oral histories, but also because she became a folk hero over time. Queen Nanny grew to a position of power in what became known as “Nanny Town,” although this town’s location moved at times based on the strength of British resistance. Her soldiers were not only masters of guerrilla warfare, but they were also immensely knowledgeable of the terrain, and even experts at using the land to hide their village from lurking European colonists. While these were the more credible factors to their success, the Maroons believed that Nanny herself was leading them toward success by using supernatural powers, including the ability to divert the enemy’s bullets.

After facing significant losses in what was known as the First Maroon War, by 1740, the British colonial forces had to sign a peace treaty with Nanny, granting her 500 acres of land, legitimizing her rule and the freedom of her people. Today, Queen Nanny is still recognized as a national hero of Jamaica.
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Hereditary Slavery 
Enslaved men and women suffered tremendously in a number of ways, including their lack of bodily integrity. Sexual exploitation of enslaved women was common, resulting in coerced sexual relationships, rape, and even pregnancy. Enslaved men sometimes held positions of authority in the slave community, establishing patriarchal dominance and giving enslaved men a degree of power over enslaved women, but they were regularly reminded that the white population remained in the true position of authority. White men continually undercut Black male dominance as white men on plantations were afraid of Black men who outnumbered them in many colonies of the New World. Part of the psychological warfare inflicted by enslavers upon Black men and women was having sexual relations with Black women to remind everyone in the enslaved community who was really in charge. In fact, most instances of Black male slaves fighting back against the planters occurred when the planters interrupted the marital relations of the enslaved community. ​

Bodily Integrity (n.), the right of every person to have control over their own body.

In a world as dark as enslaved people experienced, finding love and partnership despite such darkness an act of defiance in some ways. Couples and families still formed, though they had no legal connection to one another; including a lack of legal connection between parent and child. The enslaved woman’s experience of pregnancy, itself, exemplified the lack of bodily autonomy. For a time, planters greatly preferred women not to become pregnant because it decreased their productive potential. Very often, women were returned to the field one to two weeks after giving birth, making it impossible for the mothers to care for and nurture their infant children, leading to a high infant mortality rate, and further, some planters seemed unaffected when enslaved women demonstrated defiance by having abortions. However, depending on the slave society and the time period, the question really came down to whether that pregnancy aided or inhibited the enslaver’s profits. 

For example, one early Virginia law upended centuries of common law in England and placed the status of children under their mother rather than their father. It stated that if your mother was enslaved, you would be too. Lineage was, thus, matrilineal - but only for enslaved populations. This was an incentive for masters to have sexual relations with an enslaved woman, for if an enslaved woman produced a child, it would provide more slaves for the plantation. Certainly not all white plantation owners were rapists, but many of them similarly pursued breeding their female slaves by pairing them with male slaves. Likewise, much later, in the North American slaveholding colonies, the closing of the British slave trade in the early 19th century meant that slavery had to become self-reproducing and thus women were encouraged to bear children to maintain slave populations for labor and sale. Rape and sexual exploitation was rampant when it comes to this process, and slave women were selected according to their perceived ability to bear children. 

Drawing titled, “Can a Mother Forget Her Suckling Child?”, Public Domain

Increasingly over the next centuries, freedom was determined by whether your mother was white or Black. For example, a free white woman who gave birth to a mixed-race baby would be charged a fine for indecency, but the baby would be free. While a Black woman who gave birth to a white man’s baby would see her child similarly enslaved. Yet, this matrilineal connection extended beyond this label of free or enslaved. Enslavers were able to sell mothers away from their children, force mothers to return to work before their babies were weaned, and discipline the mothers’ children. 
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Conclusion
The African slave trade has impacted the world in countless ways, and remains a deep scar across the spectrum of history. Women’s sexuality was at the center of relationships between enslavers and the enslaved, yet despite the horrors of slavery, women found agency, resisted, and found ways to endure. Women fought against their enslavement like the Dahomey and Njinga, even if they were unable to end slavery itself. Some enslaved women fought back against their captors as they crossed the Atlantic, and many more fought back when in the possession of their enslavers. Resistance was not universal, and it was not always flashy or violent. Simple acts of defiance - from work slowages, to broken tools, to continued practice of their cultural traditions or faith, and even the forming of loving families - existed in millions of places across the New World. 

In what ways did the treatment of enslaved women reflect society’s view of women in general? How would the weaponization of enslaved women’s sexuality impact societal views of women? And what sociopolitical factors allowed for some women to combat the horrors of slavery?

Draw your own conclusions

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Frederick Forbes: Depiction Of The Amazon People

Frederick Forbes traveled to West Africa as an officer for the British Royal Navy and published his journal in 1851. He was sent to the kingdom to convince the King to suppress Dahomey's involvement with the slave trade. As Britain had banned the slave trade, Forbes worked to bring to the public's attention the slave hunts practiced by the Dahomey. This is one of his sketches of a Mino or Amazon warrior next to his description of the Amazons.

The amazons are not supposed to marry, and, by their own statement, they have changed their sex. "We are men," say they, " not women." All dress alike, diet alike, and male and female emulate each other: what the males do, the amazons will endeavour to surpass. They all take great care of their arms, polish the bar- rels, and, except when on duty, keep them in covers. There is no duty at the palace, except when the king is in public, and then a guard of amazons protect the royal person, and, on review, he is guarded by the males ; but outside the palace is always a strong detachment of males ready for service. The amazons are in barracks within the palace enclosure, and under the care of the eunuchs and the camboodee or treasurer. In every action (with males and females), there is some reference to cutting off heads. [T]he palace, or the grand Fetish houses…The royal wives and their slaves, I presume from the jealousy of their despotic lord, are considered too sacred for man to gaze upon ; and on meeting any of these sable beauties on the road, a bell warns the wayfarer to turn off, or stand against a wall while they pass. The king has thousands of wives… If one of the wives of the king, or a high officer's, commits adultery, the culprits are summarily beheaded ; and the skull of one of the Agaou's wives is at present exposed in the square of the palace of Agrimgomeh, in Abomey. But if adultery be committed by parties of lower rank, they are sold Marriages. If a uiau scduccs a girl, the law obliges marriage, and the payment of eighty heads of cowries to the parent or master, on pain of becoming himself a slave. In marriage there is no ceremony, except where the king confers the wife, in which instance the maiden presents her future lord with a glass of rum.

Forbes, Frederick. “Seh-Dong-Hong-Beh, leader of the en:Dahomey Amazons.” Dahomey of the Dahomans. 1851. (being the journals of two missions to the king of Dahomey, and residence at his capital), 23-24. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/dahomeydahomansb00forb/page/n41/mode/2up. 

Questions:

1. How did he describe the Amazon women?
2. Why might this British officer have a different perspective on the Amazons than the Dahomey themselves? How might that impact this account?

​Alfred Skertchly: Dahomey As It Is

Alfred Skertchly left England in 1871 to collect zoological specimens West Coast of Africa. He traveled to Abomey, the capital of Dahomey, to train the King on the use of new weapons. He expected to stay for eight days but was held as an unwilling, yet well treated guest. This is his account of the Amazons.

One of the most singular institutions of Dahomey is the female army, or Amazons, as they have been called. When these soldieresses were first introduced into the country is unknown… Who has not heard of the ferocious actions of a drunken woman; and do not the daily papers bear witness to the fact that, once roused, a woman will perpetrate far greater cruelty than a man? Did not the petroleuses of Paris wander about like she-demons of the nether world? What spectacle is more calculated to inspire horror than a savage and brutal woman in a passion? and when we imagine such to be besprinkled with the blood of the slain, and perhaps carrying the gory head of some decapitated victim, one may cease to wonder at the dread with which these female warriors were, and still are, looked upon by the surrounding nations… [I]t would… be a happy release from their relatives if all the old maids could be enlisted, and trained to vent their feline spite and mischief-making propensities on the enemies of the country, instead of their neighbours. At any rate, they would be removed out of the way of the sycophantic parasites, who invariably hover round them, should they be possessed of any property, in the hope of cajoling them out of it. Instances are not by any means rare, of females who have donned the soldier's uniform, and fought bravely side by side, not taking into consideration such heroines as Joan of Arc, Margaret of Anjou, Boadicea, and a host of others… As for physical endurance, do not scores of charwomen and laundresses drag out a life of literal slavery… Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the Amazonian army of Dahomey is one of the causes of its slow decadence… Dahomey will have to be classed among the nations that have been.

Skertchly, J. Alfred. “Dahomey as it Is.” London: Legare Street Press, 2021. First published in 1884 by Chapman and Hall, 454-459.

Questions:

1. Underline words used to describe the Amazon warriors.
   
2. Overall, how would you say they are viewed?
   
3. How might differences in culture impact his account?

Remedial Herstory Editors. "21. 1500-1600 GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND THE SLAVE TRADE ​." The Remedial Herstory Project. November 1, 2022. www.remedialherstory.com.​

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 College. 

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

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. Barbara Tischler 
Supervisor for Hunter College 
Dr. Pamela Scully 
Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and African Studies at Emory University ​

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Johnson draws on archival documents scattered in institutions across three continents, written in multiple languages and largely from the perspective of colonial officials and slave-owning men, to recreate black women's experiences from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue to Spanish Cuba to the swampy outposts of the Gulf Coast. Centering New Orleans as the quintessential site for investigating black women's practices of freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh argues that African women and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practices. Their stories, in both their successes and their failures, outline a practice of freedom that laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century and reshaped the New World.

Through the personal histories of four enslaved women, Finley explores the intangible costs of the slave market, moving beyond ledgers, bills of sales, and statements of profit and loss to consider the often incalculable but nevertheless invaluable place of women's emotional, sexual, and domestic labor in the economy. The details of these women's lives reveal the complex intersections of economy, race, and family at the heart of antebellum society. 

From capture to transport to sale to childbirth, these women were demographically counted as commodities during the Middle Passage, vulnerable to rape, separated from their kin at slave markets, and subject to laws that enslaved their children upon birth. In this way, they were central to the binding of reproductive labor with kinship, racial hierarchy, and the economics of slavery. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Morgan demonstrates that the development of Western notions of value and race occurred simultaneously. In so doing, she illustrates how racial capitalism denied the enslaved their kinship and affective ties while simultaneously relying on kinship to reproduce and enforce slavery through enslaved female bodies.

Margaretta Matilda Odell's 1834 Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley is the only substantive early source on Wheatley's life. Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753-1784) is considered the first African American poet to write for a transatlantic audience, and her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) kindled debates about race.

​Gendering Knowledge in Africa and the African Diaspora addresses the question of to what extent the history of gender in Africa is appropriately inscribed in narratives of power, patriarchy, migration, identity and women and men’s subjection, emasculation and empowerment. The book weaves together compelling narratives about women, men and gender relations in Africa and the African Diaspora from multidisciplinary perspectives, with a view to advancing original ways of understanding these subjects.

Women warriors planned and led revolts on slave ships during the Middle Passage. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. And then they were erased from history. Illustrated beautifully in black and white, Wake will take its place alongside classics of the graphic novel genre, like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Art Spiegelman’s Maus. This story of a personal and national legacy is a powerful reminder that while the past is gone, we still live in its wake.

Examining a wide range of societies including medieval Spain, Brazil, and New England, and including the work of historians based in Brazil, Cuba, the United States, and Britain, this collection breaks new ground in demonstrating the importance of mothering for the perpetuation of slavery, and the complexity of the experience of motherhood in such circumstances.

 The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories is an impressive and comprehensive reference work for contemporary scholarship on the cultural histories of Black women across the diaspora spanning different eras from ancient times into the twenty-first century. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into five parts. Within these sections, a diverse range of women, places, and issues are explored, including ancient African queens, Black women in early modern European art and culture, enslaved Muslim women in the antebellum United States, Sally Hemings, Phillis Wheatley, Black women writers in early twentieth-century Paris, Black women, civil rights, South African apartheid, and sexual violence and resistance in the United States in recent history.

Drawing on works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Sefi Atta, Chika Unigwe and Taiye Selasie, this book interrogates the ways in which African diaspora women’s fiction portrays the realities of otherness, hybridity and marginalized existence of female subjects beyond Africa’s borders. Overall, the book demonstrates that life in the diaspora is an uncharted journey of expanded opportunities along with paradoxical realities of otherness.

"I am a human being; I am a woman; I am a black woman; I am an African. Once I was free; then I was captured and became a slave; but inside me, here and here, I am still a free woman." During a period of four hundred years, European slave traders ferried some 12 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. In the Americas, teaching a slave to read and write was a criminal offense. When the last slaves gained their freedom in Brazil, barely a thousand of them were literate. Hardly any stories of the enslaved and transported Africans have survived. This novel is an attempt to recreate just one of those stories, one story of a possible 12 million or more. Lawrence Hill created another in The Book of Negroes (Someone Knows my Name in the U.S.) and, more recently, Yaa Gyasi has done the same in Homegoing.

In 1804, shortly before the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue is renamed Haiti, a group of women gather to bury a stillborn baby. Led by a lesbian healer and midwife named Mer, the women's lamentations inadvertently release the dead infant's "unused vitality" to draw Ezili - the Afro-Caribbean goddess of sexual desire and love - into the physical world. As Ezili explores her newfound powers, she travels across time and space to inhabit the midwife's body - as well as those of Jeanne, a mixed-race dancer and the mistress of Charles Baudelaire living in 1880s Paris, and Meritet, an enslaved Greek-Nubian prostitute in ancient Alexandria.   ​

Inspired by a 112-year-old woman the author discovered in an 1870 US Federal census report for Ohio, loosely based on the author’s real-life female ancestors, spanning more than a hundred years, from the mid-18th century to the end of America’s Civil War, and spanning across the globe, from what is now southern Nigeria to the islands of the Caribbean to North America and the land bordering the Ohio River, Things Past Telling is a breathtaking story of a past that lives on in all of us, and a life that encompasses the best - and worst - of our humanity.

Wayétu Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him. When the three meet in the settlement of Monrovia, their gifts help them salvage the tense relationship between the African American settlers and the indigenous tribes, as a new nation forms around them. ​

For 25 years, life on her farm and at the Kingsley plantation on Fort George Island was relatively tranquil. But when Florida passed from Spanish to American control, and racism and discrimination increased in the American territories, Anna Kingsley and her children migrated to a colony in Haiti established by her husband as a refuge for free blacks. Amid the spiraling racial tensions of the antebellum period, Anna returned to north Florida, where she bought and sold land, sued white people in the courts, and became a central figure in a free black community.  Such accomplishments by a woman in a patriarchal society are fascinating in themselves. To have achieved them as a woman of color is remarkable.

Effia and Esi are born into different villages in 18th-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of 20th-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.  

HOW TO TEACH WITH FILMS:

Remember, teachers want the student to be the historian. What do historians do when they watch films?

1. Before they watch, ask students to research the director and producers. These are the source of the information. How will their background and experience likely bias this film?
2. Also, ask students to consider the context the film was created in. The film may be about history, but it was made recently. What was going on the year the film was made that could bias the film? In particular, how do you think the gains of feminism will impact the portrayal of the female characters?
3. As they watch, ask students to research the historical accuracy of the film. What do online sources say about what the film gets right or wrong?
4. Afterward, ask students to describe how the female characters were portrayed and what lessons they got from the film.
5. Then, ask students to evaluate this film as a learning tool. Was it helpful to better understand this topic? Did the historical inaccuracies make it unhelpful? Make it clear any informed opinion is valid. 

12 Years a Slave (2013)
In the antebellum United States, Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery.
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bibliography

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

Hall, Rebecca Martínez Hugo and Sarula Bao. 2021. Wake : The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts First Simon & Schuster hardcover ed. New York NY: Simon & Schuster.

Miles, Rosalind. The Women’s History of the World. London, UK: HarperCollins 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%20 slaves%20 carried,leaving%20Africa%20in%20love%20 ships
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Morgan, Jennifer. Laboring women: Reproduction and gender in new world slavery. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Morgan, Jennifer L. "" Some could suckle over their shoulder": Male travelers, female bodies, and the gendering of racial ideology, 1500-1770." The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 167-192.

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