Female Slavery
The institution of slavery in North America existed from the earliest years of the colonial period up until 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln freed slaves in the rebellious southern states through the Emancipation Proclamation. The Thirteenth Amendment, taking effect in December 1865, permanently abolished slavery throughout the entire United States, including the Border states, such as Kentucky, which still had about 50,000 slaves, and among the Indian tribes. For most of the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century, male slaves outnumbered female slaves making the two groups' experiences distinct. Living and working in a wide range of circumstances and regions, African-American women and men encountered diverse experiences of enslavement. With increasing numbers of imported and American-born women, slave sex ratios leveled out between 1730 and 1750. "The uniqueness of the African-American female's situation is that she stands at the crossroads of two of the most well-developed ideologies in America, that regarding women and that regarding the Negro." Occupying both female and black identities, enslaved African women faced the double oppressions of racism and sexism.
Read more about Female Slavery: Revolutionary Era, Antebellum Period, Emancipation and The Ending of Slavery, Notable Enslaved African American Women, Further Reading
Famous quotes containing the words female and/or slavery:
“Most young black females learn to be suspicious and critical of feminist thinking long before they have any clear understanding of its theory and politics.... Without rigorously engaging feminist thought, they insist that racial separatism works best. This attitude is dangerous. It not only erases the reality of common female experience as a basis for academic study; it also constructs a framework in which differences cannot be examined comparatively.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)
“Clay answered the petition by declaring that while he looked on the institution of slavery as an evil, it was ‘nothing in comparison with the far greater evil which would inevitably flow from a sudden and indiscriminate emancipation.’”
—State of Indiana, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)