Women, Race & Class

“This bears repeating: Black women were equal to their men in the oppression they suffered; they were their men’s social equals within the slave community; and they resisted slavery with a passion equal to their men’s. This was one of the greatest ironies of the slave system, for in subjecting women to the most ruthless exploitation conceivable, exploitation which knew no sex distinctions, the groundwork was created not only for Black women to assert their equality through their social relations, but also to express it through their acts of resistance.”

This quote explains the realities of the lives of Black women during slavery. Davis hopes to emphasize that the 19th-century ideologies that defined femininity and social relations among white people did not apply among enslaved people. As she notes, Black women were not viewed as weak or feminine; they were equally oppressed as enslaved men in the fields while also experiencing sexual abused. However, Davis argues that slaveowners’ treatment of Black women backfired because they resisted slavery as fiercely as their male counterparts. Implicit in this is also an argument about Black women’s contributions (actual and potential) to feminism: Since Black women generally do not inherit the same legacy of submissiveness that middle-class white women do, they are well positioned to fight for women’s liberation.

“It would be a mistake to regard the institutionalized pattern of rape during slavery as an expression of white men’s sexual urges, otherwise stifled by the specter of white womanhood’s chastity. That would be far too simplistic an explanation. Rape was a weapon of domination, a weapon of repression, whose covert goal was to extinguish slave women’s will to resist, and in the process, to demoralize their men.”

Davis uses this quotation for two purposes. First, it rejects the “simplistic” characterization of rape during slavery as arising from white men’s sexual urges. Second, it explains one of Davis’s key arguments: that rape was a weapon against enslaved women meant to force Black women into submission and discourage resistance from all enslaved people, including men. Davis later discusses this in other contexts (e.g., the Vietnam War), her point being that rape is not simply an act of patriarchal violence, but one that can also shore up white supremacy and/or