Blog Post 9/21

Zinn’s exploration of “The Intimately Oppressed” is something that I’ve never really encountered in much depth when learning about history. The roles and experiences of women in American history have always been mentioned in my education, but only as an afterthought, whereas Zinn pays hommage to the collective American woman through his examination of her experience as chattel. He offers certain points of historical context that I had never been fully aware of; though it’s always been clear to me that the first European settlers in the colonies were men, it never occurred to me how women were later brought to the colonies. Like indentured servants, some women were shipped to the colonies in bulk, the cost of their travel becoming a debt they subsequently owed to their newfound male “masters,” which they paid in the form of housework, submission, and sexual exploitation.

In reflection of my lack of prior knowledge about this transportation of English women to the colonies, I’d like to speak on the issue of intersectionality for women of color. I was more surprised about the early commodification of white women than I’ve ever been on the topic of commodification of enslaved black women. While discussion of the commodification of black lives through slavery is often approached somewhat casually, made to be normalized through our education, I feel that history fears to reflect on the experiences of white women as plainly. This is not at all to say that the conditions faced by white women in the colonies were comparable to those of enslaved and free black women, that could not be any further from the truth. However, I feel like history’s nonchalant approach at discussing slavery and hesitant approach at discussing gender disparities is indicative of a gross normalization of the exploitation of black women in our history. When history is quicker and less apologetic in admitting its denial of humanity to black women than that of white women, I think that it reflects on America’s continual prioritization of the livelihood of white women over that of black women and other women of color. It seems to me almost as if the writers of our history are more ashamed to admit that white women were oppressed than they are to admit to the (far, far worse) oppression of black women. If the discussion of slavery is more commonplace and not as frequently given the same emotional weight as the idea of white gender inequality, what does that say about our country’s continual dehumanization of black women?

I do appreciate that Zinn explores the exploitation of enslaved black women in this chapter. He includes a quote from a formerly enslaved woman named Linda Brent who refers to her fifteenth year as “a sad epoch” in her life as a slave, the start of a season of sexual abuse and exploitation for her. These are the same words Dr. Daina Ramey Berry uses to describe the onset of puberty in her book The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, which discusses the commodification of enslaved black people through different periods of life. The sexual exploitation of women in bondage is morally unfathomable. At the onset of puberty, enslaved women were commonly sexually abused by their enslavers, forced to have sex with male slaves in the practice of “breeding,” and exploited for the purposes of objectification as well as medical research. In fact, the field of gynecology actually emerged from the practice of evaluating enslaved women’s reproductive health to determine their appraisal values in the domestic slave trade. Additionally, certain enslaved women up for auction were categorized as “fancies,” meaning that they were especially sexually attractive and bought with the primary purpose of being exploited for sex. These are horrors that white women in our history never faced and that seem to get less emphasis in the discussion of gender disparities as an aspect of our history’s normalized commodification of black women.