"My Mother Was Much of a Woman": Black Women, Work, and the Family under Slavery

Abstract

was bor back due in slavery, says Nanny to her granddaughter in Zora Neale Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, so it wasn't for me to fulfill my dreams of whut a woman oughta be and to do. Nanny had never confused the degrading regimen of slavery with her own desires as they related to work, love, and motherhood: didn't want to be used for a work-ox and a brood-sow and Ah didn't want mah daughter used dat way neither. It sho wasn't mah will for things to happen lak they did. Throughout her life, she had sustained a silent faith in herself and her sisters that was permitted no expression within the spiritual void of bondage: wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin' on high, but they wasn't no pulpit for me, she grieved.1 Nanny's lament offers a challenge to the historian who seeks to understand American slave women their unfulfilled dreams as well as their day-in, day-out experiences. Despite recent scholarly interest in the relationship between women's work and family life on the one hand and Afro-American culture on the other, a systematic analysis of the roles of slave women is lacking. In her pioneering article entitled Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves (published over a decade ago), Angela Davis made a crucial distinction between the work that women were forced to perform for a master and the domestic labor that they provided for their own families. But her emphasis on the political implications of nurturing under slavery has not received the in-depth consideration it deserves.2 For example, a few scholars have explored the roles of the bondwoman as devoted wife and mother, physically powerful