Socialist Action /March 2001
The Double Oppression of Black Women
in America
"Dat man ober dar say dat woman needs to be lifted ober ditches,
and to have de best place every whar. Nobody eber helped me into carriages,
or ober mud puddles, or gives me any best place and ar'n't I a woman?
"Look at me! Look at my arm! I have plowed, and planted, and gathered
into barns, and no man could head me-and ar'n't I a woman? I could work
as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it), and bear de lash
as well-and ar'n't I a woman?
"I have born 13 chilern and seen em mos all sold off into slavery,
and when I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard-and ar'n't
I a woman?"
-Sojourner Truth, at the women's rights convention of 1851 in Akron,
Ohio, after being greeted with boos and hisses. According to her 1878 narrative,
she used the word "ar'n't" instead of "ain't," as it
has appeared in nearly all publications since then.
By TOM SANDERS
The reproductive rights of African American women have been under attack,
one way or another, ever since they were first brought to America. The method
of assault has changed from time to time, but it has continued without let
up to the present day.
"While slave owners profited from encouraging slave women to bear
many children, modern-day taxpayers believe they save money by discouraging
poor Black women from having children," states Dorothy Roberts in her
book "Killing the Black Body" (Pantheon Books, 1997). "But
these practices share the common theme of denying a woman's freedom to control
her own reproductive life because of her race.
"Poor crack addicts and welfare mothers are punished for having
babies because they fail to measure up to the state's ideal of motherhood.
These women are not penalized simply because they may harm their unborn
children or because their childbearing will cost taxpayers money. They are
penalized because the combination of their poverty, race, and marital status
is seen to make them unworthy of procreating."
However, Black women were considered to be very worthy of having children
when they were slaves-so much so that the white master himself often fathered
as many Black babies as he could. We know this to be true not only because
history covers it very well, but because some of these babies, in their
old age, were interviewed by various government agencies.
In 1934 the Federal Emergency Relief Administration began to collect
the testimony of ex-slaves in the Ohio River Valley and in the lower South.
In 1936 the Works Progress Administration took charge of the project and
broadened it to all of the Southern states as well as Indiana, Kansas, and
Oklahoma.
One elderly ex-slave, whose name was not given, had this to say about
her white father: "Well, you know, Uncle Stephen, he kinda overseer
for some widow womans. He mama' husband. He come to see my mama any time
he gits ready. But I find out he ain't my pappy. I knowed that since I's
a little thing.
"I used to go over to Massa Daniels' plantation. They tell me all
'bout it. The folks over there they used to say to me: 'Who's your pappy?
Who's your pappy?' I just say: 'Turkey buzzard lay me and the sun hatch
me,' and then go on 'bout my business. Course all the time they knows and
I knows, too, that Massa Daniels was my pappy" (B.A. Botkin, editor,
"Lay my Burden Down," University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958).
During slavery times African American slave women were considered to
be very worthy of having babies. In fact, most white men, even Northerners
and foreigners thought that Black women were so worthy as willing mothers
that a foreign visitor, Johann Schoepf, wrote that "in almost every
house there are negresses, slaves, who count it an honor to bring a mulatto
into the world." Even the abolitionist James Redpath wrote that mulatto
women were gratified by the criminal advances of Saxons (Deborah Gray White,
"Ar'n't I a Woman?" W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1987).
Since foreign visitors and northern abolitionists felt this way we can
easily imagine how most of the Southern whites must have felt about it.
Research shows that most slave children began work in the fields by the
age of 11 and many began work there at the age of six. They were usually
placed in the "trash gang" that pulled weeds, cleaned up, hoed,
or picked cotton. This means that the ex-slave who helped raise me as a
very young child was not as old as I've long thought she was.
Thus, much of the United States wealth was built by child labor-a fact
that few people are willing to acknowledge. Most also prefer to ignore the
fact that the pace of scientific and technological change destroys the lower
rungs of the economic ladder just as most African Americans begin to reach
them. This tends to keep most Blacks not much higher in labor skills than
the youngest Black slave children in the old plantation fields-by the standards
of today's modern "computer revolution."
The rapid changes occurring in society, with the development of a new
"educated" elite, has resulted in a new change of attitude on
the part of people in various positions of power, even those with very limited
power. One example is the effort to control the Black population growth
through a form of carefully concealed violence perpetrated upon helpless
medical patients.
Dorothy Roberts reports in "Killing the Black Body" that during
the 1970s sterilization became the most rapidly growing form of birth control
in the United States, rising from 200,000 cases in 1970 to over 700,000
in 1980.
"It was a common belief among Blacks in the South," Roberts
writes, "that Black women were routinely sterilized without their informed
consent and for no valid medical reason. Teaching hospitals performed. unnecessary
hysterectomies on poor Black women as practice for their medical residents.
This sort of abuse was so widespread in the South that these operations
came to be known as 'Mississippi appendectomies.'
"In 1975, a hysterectomy cost $800 compared to a tubal ligation,
giving surgeons, who were reimbursed by Medicaid, a financial incentive
to perform the more extensive operation-despite its 20 times greater risk
of killing the patient.
"Fannie Lou Hamer, the leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party, informed a Washington, D.C., audience in 1965 that 60 percent of
the Black women in Sunflower County, Mississippi, were subjected to postpartum
sterilizations at Sunflower City Hospital without their permission. Hamer
had suffered this violation herself when she went to the hospital for the
removal of a small uterine tumor in 1961. The doctor took the liberty of
performing a complete hysterectomy without her knowledge or consent. This
practice of sterilizing Southern Black women through trickery or deceit
was confirmed by a number of physicians who examined these women after the
procedure was performed."
"Sterilization abuse was not confined to hospitals in the South,"
Roberts continues. "In April 1872, the Boston Globe ran a front-page
story reporting the complaint by a group of medical students that Boston
City Hospital was performing excessive and medically unnecessary hysterectomies
on Black patients. Among the charges were: surgeries were performed for
'training purposes'; radical and dangerous procedures were used when alternatives
were available; medical records did not reflect what had really been done
to patients; patients were pressured into signing consent forms without
adequate explanation; and doctors treated patients callously, adding to
the women's anguish."
The attitude expressed by these illegal sterilizations is very similar
to the distorted attitudes towards Black females in general, regardless
of their ages, 150 years ago. For example: When George, a Mississippi slave,
was convicted and sentenced to death in 1859 for the rape of a 10-year-old
female slave, Judge Harris reversed the decision and released George. According
to Harris the original indictment could not be sustained under common law
or under the statutes of Mississippi because 'it charges no offense known
to either system. ... There is no act which embraces either the attempted
or actual commission of a rape by a slave on a female slave.'
A Tennessee judge made this latter point when he remanded a slave named
Grandison to jail for attempting to rape a white woman named Mary Douglas.
According to Judge Green, what gave 'the offense its enormity' was the fact
that Douglass was white. 'Such an act committed on a BLACK WOMAN, would
not,' he noted, 'be punished with death'" (Deborah Gray White, "Ar'n't
I a Woman?").
Since recorded history, women of all ethnic groups have been have been
made victims because of their sex. This has been true even though some women
are physically stronger than men, have more endurance than men, and are
capable of doing manual labor even better than men.
Such a woman was the slave Susan Mabry of Virginia, who could pick 400
or 500 pounds of cotton a day. However, 150 to 200 pounds was considered
respectable for an average worker; when this writer was a teenager I found
it very hard to pick 200 pounds in one day and rarely ever did.
Jacqueline Jones in "Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (Vintage Books,
198), writes: "Together with their fathers, husbands, brothers, and
sons, black women spent up to fourteen hours a day toiling out of doors,
often under a blazing sun. In the Cotton Belt they plowed fields; dropped
seed; and hoed, picked, ginned, sorted, and moted cotton. On farms in Virginia,
North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, women hoed tobacco; laid worm fences;
and threshed, raked, and bound wheat.
"For those on the Sea Islands and in coastal areas, rice culture
included raking and burning the stubble from the previous year's crop; ditching;
sowing seed; plowing, listing, and hoeing fields; and harvesting, stacking,
and threshing the rice. In the bayou region of Louisiana, women planted
sugar cane cuttings, plowed, and helped to harvest and gin the cane.
"During the winter, they performed a myriad of tasks necessary on
nineteenth century farms. ... During the busy harvest season, everyone was
forced to labor up to sixteen hours at a time-after sunset by the light
of candles or burning pine knots. ... It is significant that overseers ordered
and supervised much of the punishment in the field, for their disciplinary
techniques were calculated to 'get as much work out of the slaves as they
can possibly perform' ....
"Consequently, many slave women were driven and beaten mercilessly,
and some achieved respite only in return for sexual submission. To a white
man, a black women was not only a worker who needed prodding, but also a
female capable of fulfilling his sexual or aggressive desires. For this
reason, a fine line existed between work-related punishment and rape...."
The mold was already formed when slavery "officially" ended.
For many years it was nearly impossible for Black women to assume roles
other than those they had held in slavery. Many white Americans, even today,
continue to perceive African American women as individuals who can be worked
hard, treated rudely, and who desire promiscious relationships.
From the official end of slavery in 1865 through almost all of the 20th
century, no southern white male was convicted of raping or attempting to
rape a Black woman. And if the perpetrator was Black, the Black woman had
no hope for justice either. When a Black man raped a Black woman, police
nearly always reported the crime as "unfounded," and in the few
cases that reached the courts, the testimony of Black female victims was
seldom believed by white juries.
Unbelievable as it may seem, one of the reasons given as proof that Black
women in the United States are naturally promiscuous is the fact that prior
to the American Revolution the female slave population grew more as a result
of natural increase than by importation. Unlike the other Western Hemisphere
countries with slavery, the United States achieved a one to one sex ratio-the
same number of women as men, although far more men were brought from Africa.
One reason for this was the creation of monogamous families in this country,
while in Latin America and the Caribbean Black men were forced to live in
barracks-like environments away from the women.
However, this fact did not make the U.S. slaves as well off as it may
appear. The North American male slaves were more easily manipulated since
their spouses and children could be held hostage and compelled to answer
for their "transgressions."
During the 19th century, when "protecting women" was almost
a part of the national religion, only slave women were so totally unprotected
by men or the law. Only African American women had their womanhood so totally
denied.
Yet, in spite of the great gulf between white and Black women at the
time, their lives were paradoxically similar. All women were overwhelmed
by work. Slave and free women alike had no visible control over reproduction.
Both were forced to relinquish control over this highly personal aspect
of female life to white males, who made all crucial decisions regarding
the future of the children.
They even decided whether or not there would be an abortion. Have the
times changed very much today?
"Relative to white men all women were powerless and exploited,"
says Deborah Gray White. "The powerlessness and exploitation of black
women was an extreme form of what all women experienced, because racism,
although just as pervasive as sexism, was more virulent. Slave women suffered
from the malevolence that flowed from both racism and sexism."
Of all large groupings of people in the United States today, Black women
are treated the worst, any way you look at it. There's less respect for
them, fewer jobs, less of everything that is needed for an even half-way
decent life. An increasing proportion of them, as well as Black men, in
future generations will exist outside the world of gainful employment as
long as the capitalist system prevails in this country
It is our task today to see to it that this system is replaced by a
new society run by and for working people and their allies-by socialism.
History is supposed to give people a sense of identity, a knowledge of
who they are and why they are living like they are. It should also act as
a springboard for the future. History must replace myths with facts. We
Americans of all colors have had enough myths, and especially African American
women.
Despite all that she has lived through and accomplished, the Black woman
today is still waiting for an affirmative answer to the plaintive question
asked 150 years ago: "Ar'n't I a woman?"
Socialist Action /March 2001 |