A Woman’s Power Even in the Worst of Times

Though absolutely devastating and often hard to swallow, the position of enslaved African American women described by Brenda E. Stevenson in “Slave Marriage and Family Relations” evoked the kinds of power that we had read about earlier (Nancy Cott).  Women had little say in determining the path of romance in their lives and would often have to endure atrocities such as rape by their masters and being birthing vessels to increase their owners’ property wealth.  Toni Morrison mirrors this sentiment in Sula when describing the cultivation of Nel and Sula’s friendship, saying of the two, “each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them . . . ” (52).  Despite such horrors, these social conditions created matrifocal slave families and power relations, where women held some control, sometimes moreso than enslaved men–“an influence not recognized in the larger society’s hierarchy, but nonetheless functional in the slave’s world view” (Stevenson, 160).

The weight of this power was tremendous.  On one hand, this matrifocality allowed women to sometimes affect the actualization of a marriage in the slave community.  However, women were also expected to make important decisions for the family and “suffer the consequences” (165).  A woman was expected to submit to her husband’s sexual advances, but she would also get the full blame for miscegenation (167-168).

Here’s where it gets interesting: some women were able to utilize their sexualities, their bodies–“a sign, in the face of heart-wrenching tragedy and oppression, of human pleasure, immortality and future security”–to better their positions (167).  Sometimes sexual favors were exchanged with white men for food, clothing and housing and in other occurances these sexual encounters were attempts to “identify with and be accepted by the “superior” race” (169).  Hegel’s “Master/Slave Dialectic” comes to mind, particularly regarding uses of contraception, miscarriages and sometimes, though seldom, infanticide (Morrison’s Beloved can be drawn on here, too).  Women’s attempts and sometimes successes at preventing childbirth were a way to stifle the growth of their master’s wealth and therefore allowed the women to stare their owners in the eye.  Sometimes their refusal to succumb to sexual advances also allowed them power because the white men did not want their spouses finding out, as demonstrated by Sukie’s resistance of her master Abbott (166).  Though enslaved men were able to get away with casual sexual encounters and avoid paternal responsibilites in the slave community, they were punished more severely for resistance by their masters by “permanent separation from their families, severe beatings, or murder” (168).

Further, great support existed amongst the women within the slave communities.  Young girls were taught the ways of womanhood and weened onto marriage by the support of the women in their families not unlike the solidarity that formed between the Victorian women in Cott’s “Passionlessness” (140).  Though in the slave communities, sometimes it was not demanded that the girl be married before intercourse or even the birth of the first child.  The relationships of the women of Sula function in similarly ways, particularly the aformentioned relationship between Nel and Sula and Eva and her children.  When Hannah’s questions Eva’s love of her children, Eva replies, “I stayed alive for you can’t you get that through your thick head” (Morrison, 69).