African women’s accustomed labor made them ideal plantation slaves.

Evidence

The African woman schooled in the art of obedience to a higher authority by the tradition of her society was probably seen by the white male slaver as an ideal subject for slavery. As much of the work to be done in the American colonies was in the area of hoe-agriculture, it undoubtedly occurred to slavers that the African female, accustomed to performing arduous work in the fields while also performing a wide variety of tasks in the domestic household, would be very useful on the American plantation. — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 55

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Egyptian slavery ranked slaves by ethnicity, placing Circassians and Ethiopians above African women.; Black women under slavery were doubly enslaved by race and sex — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 26; Enslaved black women worked as hard as men but were barred from supervisory roles — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 62 (+2 more)

Related

• Enslaved black women worked as hard as men but were barred from supervisory roles (similarity 0.90)
• Black slave gender roles replicated white patriarchal divisions of labor (similarity 0.87)
• Enslaved black women shared racial status with men but faced sexist subordination (similarity 0.85)
• Sexism made the black female slave’s lot harsher than the male’s (similarity 0.84)
• Slavery forced black women into work independence, not voluntary choice (similarity 0.84)
• Matrilineal inheritance of slave status made black women’s breeding economically central (similarity 0.83)
• Black women’s exploitation is better described as masculinization than black men’s de-masculinization. (similarity 0.83)
• African men only adopted a protector role toward all Black women after slavery (similarity 0.83)
• Slavery elevated white women’s social status above black people (similarity 0.82)
• The cult of true womanhood demoralized enslaved women and enabled manipulation (similarity 0.82)
• Black women under slavery were doubly enslaved by race and sex (similarity 0.82)
• Slave labor displaced woman’s economic role and diverted the master’s tyranny onto her (similarity 0.82)
• Enslaved women’s unpaid labor did not produce feminist consciousness but resentment at denied womanhood (similarity 0.82)
• Black women bore the brunt of slave-ship terror because they could not retaliate (similarity 0.82)
• Black men asserted dominance over women to compensate for losing to white men (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Black women under slavery were doubly enslaved by race and sex #expands (0.70) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 26
• Slave-control ideology assigned each African ethnicity a natural niche matching its labor role #corroborates (0.65)
• Enslaved black women shared racial status with men but faced sexist subordination #expands (0.60) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 150
• Enslaved black women worked as hard as men but were barred from supervisory roles #corroborates (0.55) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 62