Difference between revisions of "Week 10 Questions/Comments-327 09"
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(→Angelina Grimké Weld, 1839, “The Cruel Mistress”) |
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When Thelma Jennings wrote that slave women would go so far as to induce miscarriages and practice abortion in order "deprive" their owners of what they most wanted (more slaves in order to increase their productivity and therefore their wealth and social standing), I was astonished. I can understand it being a form of passive resistance, and slave women perhaps wanting to assert some control over their lives in any way that they could, but I can't imagine being so resentful and bitter (perhaps that is not the best word, but I can't think of a better one right now....) that a woman would take the life of her child. Did she feel it was in the child's best interests- maybe to prevent him/her from suffering the way that she felt she was suffering? I'm not sure. That statement just totally blew me away- it made me realize how far some slave women were really willing to go in order to demonstrate, in their own way, their contempt and hatred of the situation they were in. -Allison Godart | When Thelma Jennings wrote that slave women would go so far as to induce miscarriages and practice abortion in order "deprive" their owners of what they most wanted (more slaves in order to increase their productivity and therefore their wealth and social standing), I was astonished. I can understand it being a form of passive resistance, and slave women perhaps wanting to assert some control over their lives in any way that they could, but I can't imagine being so resentful and bitter (perhaps that is not the best word, but I can't think of a better one right now....) that a woman would take the life of her child. Did she feel it was in the child's best interests- maybe to prevent him/her from suffering the way that she felt she was suffering? I'm not sure. That statement just totally blew me away- it made me realize how far some slave women were really willing to go in order to demonstrate, in their own way, their contempt and hatred of the situation they were in. -Allison Godart | ||
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| + | I noticed in one of the testimonies that a woman whose father was a white slaver owner and her mother a slave described her mother as being very light skinned and favored amongst the white. That seemed to be a pattern in the literature on the south that I have read that those who were light skinned were more likely to be exploited into having sexual relations with their masters. Would women like her and mulatto children have been treated differently by their fellow slaves? I wonder if they would have been resentful and bitter towards these women and children even though they were almost always the victims. -Emma Peck | ||
