— her clothing, hairbrushes, all personal effects however insignificant. He also, of course, had the right to her labor as a domestic, and owned all that she made with her hands— food,
clothing, textiles, etc.
A man had the right of corporal punishment, or “chastisement” as it was then called. Wives were whipped and beaten for disobedience, or on whim, with the full sanction of law and
custom.
A wife who ran away was a fugitive slave. She could be
hunted down, returned to her owner, and brutally punished by
being jailed or whipped. Anyone who aided her in her escape,
or who gave her food or shelter, could be prosecuted for robbery.
Marriage was a tomb. Once inside it, a woman was civilly
dead. She had no political rights, no private rights, no personal rights. She was owned, body and soul, by her husband.
Even when he died, she could not inherit the children she had
birthed; a husband was required to bequeath his children to
another male who would then have the full rights of custody
and guardianship.
Most white women, of course, were brought to the colonies
as married chattel. A smaller group of white women, however,
were brought over as indentured servants. Theoretically, indentured servants were contracted into servitude for a specified amount of time, usually in exchange for the price of passage. But, in fact, the time of servitude could be easily extended by the master as a punishment for infraction of rules
or laws. For example, it often happened that an indentured
servant, who had no legal or economic means of protection by
definition, would be used sexually by her master, impregnated,
then accused of having borne a bastard, which was a crime.
The punishment for this crime would be an additional sentence of service to her master. One argument used to justify this abuse was that pregnancy had lessened the woman’s usefulness, so that the master had been cheated of labor. The woman was compelled to make good on his loss.
Female slavery in England, then in Amerika, was not structurally different from female slavery anywhere else in the world. The institutional oppression of women is not the
product of a discrete historical time, nor is it derived from a
particular national circumstance, nor is it limited to Western
culture, nor is it the consequence of a particular economic
system. Female slavery in Amerika was congruent with the
universal character of abject female subjugation: women were
carnal chattel; their bodies and all their biological issue were
owned by men; the domination of men over them was systematic, sadistic, and sexual in its origins; their slavery was the base on which all social life was built and the model from
which all other forms of social domination were derived.
The atrocity of male domination over women poisoned the
social body, in Amerika as elsewhere. The first to die from this
poison, of course, were women—their genius destroyed; every
human potential diminished; their strength ravaged; their bodies plundered; their will trampled by their male masters.
But the will to domination is a ravenous beast. There are
never enough warm bodies to satiate its monstrous hunger.
Once alive, this beast grows and grows, feeding on all the life
around it, scouring the earth to find new sources of nourishment. This beast lives in each man who battens on female servitude.
Every married man, no matter how poor, owned one slave
— his wife. Every married man, no matter how powerless
compared to other men, had absolute power over one slave—
his wife. Every married man, no matter what his rank in the
world of men, was tyrant and master over one woman— his
wife.
And every man, married or not, had a gender class consciousness of his right to domination over women, to brutal and absolute authority over the bodies of women, to ruthless
and malicious tyranny over the hearts, minds, and destinies of
women. This right to sexual domination was a birthright,
predicated on the will of God, fixed by the known laws of
biology, not subject to modification or to the restraint of law
or reason. Every man, married or not, knew that he was not a
woman, not carnal chattel, not an animal put on earth to be
fucked and to breed. This knowledge was the center of his
identity, the source of his pride, the germ of his power.
It was, then, no contradiction or moral agony to begin to
buy black slaves. The will to domination had battened on
female flesh; its muscles had grown strong and firm in subju
gating women; its lust for power had become frenzied in the
sadistic pleasure of absolute supremacy. Whatever dimension
of human conscience must atrophy before men can turn other
humans into chattel had become shriveled and useless long
before the first black slaves were imported into the English
colonies. Once female slavery is established as the diseased
groundwork of a society, racist and other hierarchical pathologies inevitably develop from it.
There was a slave trade in blacks which pre-dated the English colonialization of what is now the eastern United States.
During the Middle Ages, there were black slaves in Europe in
comparatively small numbers. It was the Portuguese who first
really devoted themselves to the abduction and sale of blacks.
They developed the Atlantic slave trade. Black slaves were
imported in massive quantities into Portuguese, Spanish,
French, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish colonies.
In the English colonies, as I have said, every married man
had one slave, his wife. As men accrued wealth, they bought
more slaves, black slaves, who were already being brought
across the Atlantic to be sold into servitude. A man’s wealth
has always been measured by how much he owns. A man buys
property both to increase his wealth and to demonstrate his
wealth. Black slaves were bought for both these purposes.
The laws which fixed the chattel status of white women
were now extended to apply to the black slave. The divine
right which had sanctioned the slavery of women to men was
now interpreted to make the slavery of blacks to white men a
function of God’s will. The malicious notion of biological inferiority, which originated to justify the abject subjugation of women to men, was now expanded to justify the abject subjugation of blacks to whites. The whip, used to cut the backs of white women to ribbons, was now wielded against black flesh
as well.
Black men and black women were both kidnapped from
their African homes and sold into slavery, but their condition
in slavery differed in kind. The white man perpetuated his
view of female inferiority in the institution of black slavery.
The value of the black male slave in the marketplace was
double the value of the black female slave; his labor in the
field or in the house was calculated to be worth twice hers.
The condition of the black woman in slavery was determined first by her sex, then by her race. The nature of her servitude differed from that of the black male because she was
carnal chattel, a sexual commodity, subject to the sexual will
of her white master. In the field or in the house, she endured
the same conditions as the male slave. She worked as hard; she
worked as long; her food and clothing were
as inadequate; her
superiors wielded the whip against her as often. But the black
woman was bred like a beast of burden, whether the stud who
mounted her was her white master or a black slave of his
choosing. Her economic worth, always less than that of a
black male, was measured first by her capacity as a breeder to
produce more wealth in the form of more slaves for the master; then by her capacities as a field or house slave.
As black slaves were imported into the English colonies, the
character of white female slavery was altered in a very bizarre
way. Wives remained chattel. Their purpose was still to produce sons year after year until they died. But their male masters, in an ecstasy of domination, put their bodies to a new use: they were to be ornaments, utterly useless, utterly passive, decorative objects kept to demonstrate the surplus wealth of the master.
This creation of woman-as-ornament can be observed in all
societies predicated on female slavery where men have accumulated wealth. In China, for instance, where for a thousand years women’s feet were bound, the poor woman’s feet were bound loosely— she still had to work; her feet were
bound, her husband’s were not; that made him superior to her
because he could walk faster than she could; but still, she had
to produce the children and raise them, do the domestic labor,
and often work in the fields as well; he could not afford to
cripple her completely because he needed her labor. But the
woman who was wife to the rich man was immobilized; her
feet were reduced to stumps so that she was utterly useless,
except as a fuck and a breeder. The degree of her uselessness
signified the degree of his wealth. Absolute physical crippling
was the height of female fashion, the ideal of feminine beauty,
the erotic touchstone of female identity.
In Amerika as elsewhere, physical bondage was the real
purpose of high feminine fashion. The lady’s costume was a
sadistic invention designed to abuse her body. Her ribs were
pushed up and in; her waist was squeezed to its tiniest possible
size so that she would resemble an hourglass; her skirts were
wide and very heavy. The movements that she could make in
this constraining and often painful attire were regarded as the
essence of feminine grace. Ladies fainted so often because
they could not breathe. Ladies were so passive because they
could not move.
Also, of course, ladies were trained to mental and moral
idiocy. Any display of intelligence compromised a lady’s value
as an ornament. Any assertion of principled will contradicted
her master’s definition of her as a decorative object. Any rebellion against the mindless passivity which the slave-owning class had articulated as her true nature could incur the wrath
of her powerful owner and bring on her censure and ruin.
The expensive gowns which adorned the lady, her leisure,
and her vacuity have obscured for many the cold, hard reality
of her status as carnal chattel. Since her function was to signify male wealth, it is often assumed that she possessed that wealth. In fact, she was a breeder and an ornament, with no
private or political rights, with no claim either to dignity or
freedom.
The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics
which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a
common condition, and make united rebellion against the
oppressor inconceivable. The power of the master is absolute
and incontrovertible. His authority is protected by civil law,
armed force, custom, and divine and/or biological sanction.
Slaves characteristically internalize the oppressor’s view of
them, and this internalized view congeals into a pathological
self-hatred. Slaves typically learn to hate the qualities and
behaviors which characterize their own group and to identify
their own self-interest with the self-interest of their oppressor.
The master’s position at the top is invulnerable; one aspires to
become the master, or to become close to the master, or to be
recognized by virtue of one’s good service to the master. Resentment, rage, and bitterness at one’s own powerlessness cannot be directed upward against him, so it is all directed
against other slaves who are the living embodiment of one’s
own degradation.
Among women, this dynamic works itself out in what Phyllis Chesler has called “harem politics. ”3 The first wife is tyrant over the second wife who is tyrant over the third wife, etc.
The authority of the first wife, or any other woman in the
harem who has prerogatives over other women, is a function
of her powerlessness in relation to the master. The labor that
she does as a fuck and as a breeder can be done by any other
woman of her gender class. She, in common with all other
women of her abused class, is instantly replaceable. This
means that whatever acts of cruelty she commits against other
women are done as the agent of the master. Her behavior
inside the harem over and against other women is in the interest of her master, whose dominance is fixed by the hatred of women for each other.
Inside the harem, removed from all access to real power,
robbed of any possibility of self-determination, all women
typically act out on other women their repressed rage against
the master; and they also act out their internalized hatred of
their own kind. Again, this effectively secures the master’s
dominance, since women divided against each other will not
unite against him.
In the domain of the owner of black slaves, the white
woman was the first wife, but the master had many other concubines, actually or potentially—black women slaves. The
white wife became her husband’s agent against these other
carnal chattel. Her rage against her owner could only be taken
out on them, which it was, often ruthlessly and brutally. Her
hatred of her own kind was acted out on those who, like her,
were carnal chattel, but who, unlike her, were black. She also,
of course, aggressed against her own white daughters by binding and shackling them as ladies, forcing them to develop the passivity of ornaments, and endorsing the institution of marriage.
Black women slaves, on whose bodies the carnage of white
male dominance was visited most savagely, had lives of unrelieved bitterness. They did backbreaking labor; their children were taken from them and sold; they were the sexual servants
of their masters; and they often bore the wrath of white
women humiliated into cruelty by the conditions of their own
servitude.
Harem politics, the self-hatred of the oppressed which
wreaks vengeance on its own kind, and the tendency of the
slave to identify her own self-interest with the self-interest of
the master— all conspired to make it impossible for white
women, black women, and black men to understand the astonishing similarities in their conditions and to unite against their common oppressor.
Now, there are many who believe that changes occur in
society because of disembodied processes: they describe
change in terms of technological advances; or they paint giant
pictures of abstract forces clashing in thin air. But I think that
we as women know that the
re are no disembodied processes;
that all history originates in human flesh; that all oppression is
inflicted by the body of one against the body of another; that
all social change is built on the bone and muscle, and out of
the flesh and blood, of human creators.
Two such creators were the Grimke sisters of Charleston,
South Carolina. Sarah, bom in 1792, was the sixth of fourteen
children; Angelina, bom in 1805, was the last. Their father
was a rich lawyer who owned numerous black slaves.
Early in her childhood, Sarah rebelled against her own
condition as a lady and against the ever-present horror of
black slavery. Her earliest ambition was to become a lawyer,
but education was denied her by her outraged father who
wanted her only to dance, flirt, and marry. “With me learning
was a passion, ” she wrote later. “My nature [was] denied her
appropriate nutriment, her course counteracted, her aspirations crushed. ”4 In her adolescence, Sarah conscientiously defled the Southern law that prohibited teaching slaves to
read. She gave reading lessons in the slave Sunday school until
she was discovered by her father; and even after that, she
continued to tutor her own maid. “The light was put out, ” she
wrote, “the keyhole screened, and flat on our stomachs, before
the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the
laws of South Carolina. ”5 Eventually, this too was discovered,
and understanding that the maid would be whipped for further
infractions, Sarah ended the reading lessons.
In 1821, Sarah left the South and went to Philadelphia. She
renounced her family’s Episcopal religion and became a
Quaker.
Angelina, too, could not tolerate black slavery. In 1829, at
the age of twenty-four, she wrote in her diary: “That system
must be radically wrong which can only be supported by
transgressing the laws of God. ”6 In 1828, she too moved to
Philadelphia.
In 1835, Angelina wrote a personal letter to William Lloyd
Garrison, the militant abolitionist. She wrote: “The ground
Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics Page 12