This is an integrated education lecture for US History, African American History, and Literature. Confluence to the slide deck you can read the Incidents of a Slaver Girl by Harriett Jacobs.

1. Slavery & Suffering
: Women in Slavery
D R . J E A N N I C E F A I R R E R S A M A N I
A F R I C A N A M E R I C A N - L I T

2. And the Worlds
Economy

3. Life Aboard a Slave Ship | History
Life Aboard a Slave Ship

5. Suffering of
Slavery
R E F L E C T I O N Q U E S T I O N :
S T A T E I N O N E W O R D O R
S H O R T P H R A S E Y O U R F E E L
O R T H O U G H T

6. Slavery and Suffering - History Of Africa
with Zeinab Badawi

7. Women and Slavery in Africa
• Kidnapping, warfare, seizure, and enslavement were gendered experiences in the
sense that men, women, and children did not necessarily face the same process.
• Each enslaved woman and man was an individual who navigated bondage,
resistance, dependency, and violence with different degrees of success within
specific contexts.
• Recognizing their complexities and the variations regarding their enslavement and
bondage is vital to avoiding essentialization of African slavery as a monolithic or
an ahistorical institution.

8. Women and Slavery in Africa
• Women composed most of the enslaved population within
the African continent, due in part to the operation of
internal markets and local demands.
• The internal demand for enslaved women affected prices,
values, and flows of the external slave trades, as well as
gender imbalance.

9. Slaves exposed for sale
Source: Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
They were valued as producers and
reproducers who could attend to sexual
demands and be incorporated into
lineages as unfree people.
During slavery, the bodies of female
slaves were on constant display in the
field, on the auction block, and at
whippings, fueling myths about their
sexual promiscuousness.

10. One of many Women’s Resilience and
Impact on American History

11. Female slaves were not simply “victims”
Played critical roles in slavery economy
• Women in bondage played major economic roles in the domestic and public spheres
as:
• performing tasks as reproduction Nursemaids feeding White Children from
their breast, when their birth children had to cut-short of their bond and
nourishment from their mothers
• Farmers, miners, and skilled craftsperson,
• street vendors, and cooks,
• Healing medical practitioners

12. Female slaves were not simply “victims”
• As often as black men, black women rebelled against the inhumanities of slave
owners.
• Restricted mobility leads to alternative forms of resistance
• Truancy
• Poisoning Master
• Playing sick
• Used cognitive intelligence
• Harriet Jacob’s thwarting of her slave owner in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

13. • Harriet Jones with her daughter and granddaughter.
Source: Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.
Whenever possible,
black slave women
manipulated their unique
circumstances in the
struggle for their
personal dignity and that
of their families.