My Brother Slaves: Friendship, Masculinity, and Resistance in the Antebellum South

In 1985, Deborah Gray White wrote A’rn’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, arguably one of the most important works in American social history. White related a simple story – the routine of enslaved black women’s lives, and the dangers and opportunities found in that mundanity. Historiographically, A’rn’t I a Woman? pushed back against scholars like Herbert Gutman and Eugene Genovese who, in seeking to prove the strength of the patriarchal black family, had uncritically assumed that black gender roles mirrored those of white gender society. In contrast, White argued that enslaved women did not rely on men for subsistence and protection but rather depended on their own ingenuity and the support of a network of enslaved women, and she concluded that, despite relatively egalitarian status, women and men experienced slavery very differently. White’s study seems a bit quaint when compared to today’s more dynamic and inventive interpretations of enslaved women. Make no mistake, however: none of today’s scholarship on enslaved American women specifically or slavery in general is possible without the foundation laid by White.(1)