Slave woman

“ There is another class of women in this country, to whom I cannot refer, without feelings of the deepest shame and sorrow. I allude to our female slaves. Our southern cities are whelmed beneath a tide of pollution; the virtue of female slaves is wholly at the mercy of irresponsible tyrants, and women are bought and sold in our slave markets, to gratify the brutal lust of those who bear the name of Christians. ”

“ And this married servitude exposes the wife to as great suffering as negro servitude did. It is my candid opinion, that no Southern slave ever suffered more spiritual agony than I have suffered; as I am more developed in my moral and spiritual nature than they are, therefore more capable of suffering. I think no slave mother ever endured more keen anguish by being deprived of her own offspring than I have in being legally separated from mine. God grant that married woman’s emancipation may quickly follow in the wake of negro emancipation! ”

“ Like other old slave-women in our Southern States (mammies or aunties, as they are called) , I presume she is pretty kindly treated, and such a change as you propose at her time of life might make her much less comfortable than she would be to continue to the last in her accustomed place and condition.”
“O sir!” he said, with great earnestness, “she is a slave. Every one in slavery longs to be free. I am sure she would rather suffer a great deal as a free woman than to live any longer, however comfortably, as a slave.” ”

“ They who had so diligently rolled up petitions for the emancipation and enfranchisement of the slaves now demanded the same liberties, not only for the white women of the nation, but for the newly made freed-women from Southern plantations, who had borne more grievous burdens and endured keener sufferings in the flesh and far more aggravating humiliations in spirit, than the man slave could ever know. ”

“ The fear of God, and the hope of heaven, are found sufficient to sustain many slave-women, amidst the snares and dangers of their strange lot; but, this side of God and heaven, a slave-woman is at the mercy of the power, caprice and passion of her owner. ”

“ In our slave States, if amid all her degradation and ignorance, a woman desires to preserve her virtue unsullied, she is either bribed or whipped into compliance, or if she dares resist her seducer, her life by the laws of some of the slave States may be, and has actually been sacrificed to the fury of disappointed passion. Where such laws do not exist, the power which is necessarily vested in the master over his property, leaves the defenceless slave entirely at his mercy, and the sufferings of some females on this account, both physical and mental, are intense. ”

“ One day I saw a slave pass our gate, muttering, "It's his own, and he can kill it if he will." My grandmother told me that woman's history. Her mistress had that day seen her baby for the first time, and in the lineaments of its fair face she saw a likeness to her husband. She turned the bondwoman and her child out of doors, and forbade her ever to return. The slave went to her master, and told him what had happened. He promised to talk with her mistress, and make it all right. ”

“ People can flog a negro almost to death, and yet not let a drop of blood flow. The strip of cow-hide which is used in-doors, can cause the most horrible torture without any mark being left.
“Women are not unfrequently the most horrible tormentors of the house-slaves; and I would rather be one of the field-hands than the house-slave of a passionate woman. The institution of slavery seems to change the very nature of woman. ”

“ It is often asserted that as woman has always been man's slave — subject — inferior — dependent, under all forms of government and religion, slavery must be her normal condition. This might have some weight had not the vast majority of men also been enslaved for centuries to kings and popes, and orders of nobility, who, in the progress of civilization, have reached complete equality. ”

“ Nor do the master’s daughters always escape. Severe retributions sometimes come upon him for the wrongs he does to the daughters of the slaves. The white daughters early hear their parents quarrelling about some female slave. Their curiosity is excited, and they soon learn the cause. They are attended by the young slave girls whom their father has corrupted; and they hear such talk as should never meet youthful ears, or any other ears. They know that the woman slaves are subject to their father’s authority in all things; and in some cases they exercise the same authority over the men slaves. ”

“ A woman of the upper class can sell herself into slavery only by disguising her high birth and so deceiving her purchaser, for no gentleman would knowingly buy a lady's person, not only because of the innate impropriety of the transaction, but because he would subject himself to the most caustic criticism of his peers.
The second way in which a woman could become a slave was as follows. ”

“ There are, to put it mildly, hundreds—yes, thousands—of trusting mothers in the smaller cities, the towns, villages and farming communities of the United States who believe that their daughters are "getting on fine" in the city, and too busy to come home for a visit or "to write much," while the fact is that these daughters have been swept into the gulf of white slavery [Pg 51] —the worst doom that can befall a woman. ”

“ First.—The married women and their legal status. What is servitude? "The condition of a slave." What is a slave? "A person who is robbed of the proceeds of his labor; a person who is subject to the will of another."
By the law of Georgia, South Carolina, and all the States of the South, the negro had no right to the custody and control of his person. ”

“ In the early history of nations, woman has always been the slave. She is still such, confessed, in all barbarous or but partially civilized tribes. Condemned, by custom or her lord’s caprice, to menial offices, she has pandered to his transient emotion, suffered its hardest consequences, and still drudged on. ”

“ Of Sarah and Angelina Grimke I knew but little personally. These brave sisters from Charleston, South Carolina, had inherited slaves, but in their conversion from Episcopacy to Quakerism, in 1828, became convinced that they had no right to such inheritance. They emancipated their slaves and came North and entered at once upon the pioneer work in the advancing education of woman, though they saw then in their course only their duty to the slave. They had “fought the good fight” ”

“ What is this history of Fantine? It is society purchasing a slave.
From whom? From misery.
From hunger, cold, isolation, destitution. A dolorous bargain. A soul for a morsel of bread. Misery offers; society accepts.
The sacred law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it does not, as yet, permeate it; it is said that slavery has disappeared from European civilization. This is a mistake. It still exists; but it weighs only upon the woman, and it is called prostitution.
It weighs upon the woman, that is to say, upon grace, weakness, beauty, maternity. ”

“ "Be then my slave, and know what it means to be delivered into the hands of a woman." ”

“ I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I can just let her alone. ”

“ 'Can man be free if woman be a slave? ”

“ A free race cannot be born of slave mothers. ”

“ If any mortal should cultivate an abhorrence of slavery, the female sex should do it. Whatever any one may hold to be the social relation between free women and slave women, yet before God and Christ, and all the holy angels, they belong to the same sisterhood of the human race. ”

“ Even a woman may be good, and also a slave; though the woman may be said to be an inferior being, and the slave quite worthless. ”

“ You told me that I might become a great actress: I have set my heart on becoming one; on learning to move the hearts of men, till the time comes when I can tell them, show them, in living flesh and blood, upon the stage, the secrets of a slave's sorrows, and that slave a woman. ”

“ When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own. ”

“ Neither do I care to excite sympathy for my own sufferings. But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is. Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations. ”

“ The married woman is a slave whom one must know how to set upon a throne. ”

“ But women have been kidnapped not merely for sexual reasons, but also for their ability to work. Herewith we open the darkest chapter in woman’s history: Slavery, a word which has not lost its terrible meaning for women up to the present day. ”

“ Add to this the ambitious but weak love of power—of having some one to rule—inherent in the natures of most men, and the causes of woman's bondage are pretty clear. In the light of the developments of the past few months it is plain that the most thorough faced abolitionists—those who wax eloquent for the negro—are as much in favor of continuing the slavery of women as were Southern planters of continuing negro slavery. ”

“ Still again, one of the more revolting features of chattel slavery has always been considered the subjection of the slave women to the lust of their masters. How was it in this respect under the rule of the rich? We read in our histories that great armies of women in your day were forced by poverty to make a business of submitting their bodies to those who had the means of furnishing them a little bread. The books say that these armies amounted in your great cities to bodies of thirty or forty thousand women. ”

“ In all slave-holding communities, colored women are emphatically “beasts of burden;” yet, under kindly influences, they are capable of the same moral and intellectual cultivation as other human beings.
One of the worst features of this polluting system is that female slaves are neither protected by law, or restrained by public opinion. Their masters own them as property, and have despotic control over their actions; and such is their degraded condition, that to be the mistress of a white man is an object of ambition rather than of shame. ”

“ This woman, a full-blooded African, thick-lipped and heavy-eyed, with the signs of her seventy years set fast in deep wrinkles and stooping shoulders, has, perhaps, done more than any single individual to free her nation and hasten the "crash of slavery’s broken locks." ”

“ Surely, the friends of humanity, of the right and the true, never needed help more than we needed it. And here had come two well-informed persons of exalted character from the midst of slavedom to testify to the correctness of our allegations against slavery, and tell of more of its horrors than we knew. And shall they not be heard because they are women? I saw, I felt it was a miserable prejudice that would forbid woman to speak or to act in behalf of the suffering, the outraged, just as her heart may prompt and as God has given her power. ”

“ She cherished a bitter resentment for the slaveholders, vowing that it was barbarous and inhuman to own human beings as her husband and neighbors did. Though expressing pity for the poor, simple, dependent creatures, she did little [Pg 13] to make their tasks more healthful and reasonable ones, or to render them more capable and contented.
Her baby’s nurse was the one servant of her household who met with gracious treatment at her hands. This old slave came to her endowed with the womanly virtues of honor, self-respect and humility. ”

“ But this weak acceptance of these arbitrary laws cannot fairly be ascribed entirely to the fault of woman. ‘Slavery in no form is natural;’ it is an artificial creation of man’s; and woman’s slavery cannot be taken as an exception to this maxim. She has, in point of fact, been subjected to bondage, a bondage which has, in a manner, become second nature to her, and which custom has taught her to regard as a part of the inevitable. ”

“ This was the rise of the African cloud, as yet no bigger than a man's hand, but in time to grow to most portentous dimensions, and to bear the whirlwind as its legitimate progeny. It may be questioned why note is made of the rise of slavery in a book devoted to the history of woman ”

“ The prolonged slavery of woman is the darkest page in human history. ”

“ And yet less shocking than the fate of millions of the women of our own race who have been violated by the seigneurs and the ecclesiastics. Those wretched women left their master's couch only to return to the exhausting and even crushing toils of servitude. Degraded, dejected, bought and sold like cattle, dying of grief or under their master's blows, ignorant of the joys of family life and depraved, they were brutified by slavery. Such, for centuries past, has been the condition of the women of our race, and still continues to be. ”

“ Under the head of "the part which the very women take in these punishments," a female slave is punished for being found pregnant; another for not bringing home the full wages of prostitution; another for jealousy on the part of her mistress; others again from an opinion that slaves could not be managed without severity; and others in the moments of passion, without even the allegation of a fault. ”