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

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.

Early Contact with African Women

West 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. 

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.

Queen Njinga Mbande

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.

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. 

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, “Male and female emulate each other: what the males do, the Amazons will endeavour to surpass.” 

The Dahomey Amazons marching to war

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. 

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. 

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

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. 

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.

A slave auction

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. 

A sugarcane plantation

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. 

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. 

Inside a building used for boiling sugarcane

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.

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.

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. 

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?”

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?