White wives sometimes encouraged their husbands to take black mistresses.

Evidence

I believe nearly all white men take, and expect to take undue liberties with their colored female servants—not only the father, but in many cases the sons also. Those servants who rebel against such familiarity must either leave or expect a mighty hard time, if they stay. By comparison those who tamely admit to these improper relations live in clover. They always have a little spending change, wear better clothes, and are able to get off from work at least once a week—and sometimes oftener. This moral debasement is not at all times unknown to the white women in these homes. I know of more than one colored woman who was openly importuned by white women to become the mistresses of their white husbands, on the grounds that they, the white wives, were afraid that, if their husbands did not associate with colored women, they would certainly do so with outside white women, and the white wives, for reasons which ought to be perfectly obvious, preferred to have their husbands do wrong with the colored women in order to keep their husbands straight. — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 181

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the simple white-man-victimizes-black-woman narrative by showing white women as complicit intermediaries, relevant to hooks’s broader critique of white feminism. — connects to: White mistresses usually sided with their husbands against enslaved women — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 112; White men were encouraged to exploit black women but not marry them — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 193; White mistresses often punished rather than protected sexually exploited slave women (+2 more)
• QUESTION: What does this pattern of white wives engineering black mistresses suggest about the sexual politics of the white household and its impact on black women’s bargaining power?

Related

• White mistresses usually sided with their husbands against enslaved women (similarity 0.91)
• White men were encouraged to exploit black women but not marry them (similarity 0.88)
• White mistresses often punished rather than protected sexually exploited slave women (similarity 0.85)
• White women, not white men, were slavery’s most direct beneficiaries (similarity 0.85)
• Enslaved black women withheld the respect they granted white men from white mistresses (similarity 0.83)
• Nineteenth-century sexual morality taught mistresses to blame enslaved women for rape (similarity 0.82)
• White male sexual power over slaves redirected white women’s anger onto black women (similarity 0.82)
• Enslaved women absorbed anti-woman violence that white women otherwise faced (similarity 0.82)
• Black men asserted dominance over women to compensate for losing to white men (similarity 0.80)
• Sexual exploitation dehumanized black women more than labor exploitation did (similarity 0.80)
• Devaluation of black womanhood licensed exploitation and prostitution (similarity 0.79)
• White women feared black women’s perceived immorality threatened their own status (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial marriage attitudes shifted from handicapping to requiring white wives (similarity 0.79)
• Warnings against white men function as psychological control over black women’s freedom. (similarity 0.79)
• Slave sexual violence was punishment, with the master’s deviance transferred to the woman (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• White men were encouraged to exploit black women but not marry them #expands (0.70) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 193
• White mistresses often punished rather than protected sexually exploited slave women #complicates (0.60)
• White women allied with white men on shared racism against Black women #complicates (0.55) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 119
• Enslaved black women withheld the respect they granted white men from white mistresses #complicates (0.50) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 450