Black Women and Sexual Violence in the Antebellum South

When historian Deborah Gray White asked, “where were the women” in studies of American slavery, she paved the way for a new field of study on slavery, gender, and sexuality that illuminated enslaved women’s vulnerability to sexual violence. This historiographical review of black women and sexual violence in the antebellum South will begin with these classic social and legal studies that demonstrated how myths of black women’s sexual lasciviousness and slave societies’ dependence on their sexual reproduction made enslaved women vulnerable to reproductive exploitation, rape, and other forms of sexual violence. It will then trace subsequent waves of scholarship that took up interracial sex and sexual violence to reveal the various ways that enslaved women imagined and negotiated power in courts, the plantation household, and interpersonal relationships. Present-day scholarship of enslaved women and sexual violence grows ever more nuanced as scholars delve into the sexual economy of slavery and ask new questions about enslaved women’s erotic and interior lives.