Female Slaves: Sex Roles and Status in the Antebellum Plantation South

This paper analyzes female slave life in the context of female slave interaction and familial roles. It looks at the bonded woman's work, her control of particular resources, her contribution to slave households, and her ability to cooperate with other women on a daily basis. It suggests that in relation to the slave family, too much emphasis has been placed on what men could not do rather than on what women could do and did. It finds that the bonded female made significant "economic" contributions to the slave family, that the slave's world was sex stratified so that the female slave world existed quite independently of the male slave world, and that slave families were matrifocal.