Black And White Women Of The Old South Essay -- essays research papers

Minrose Gwin‘s book, Black and White Women of the Old South, argues that history has problems with objectiveness. Her book brings to life interesting interpretations on the view of the women of the old south and chattel slavery in historical American fiction and autobiography. Gwin’s main arguments discussed how the white women of the south in no way wanted to display any kind of compassion for a fellow woman of African descent. Gwin described the "sisterhood" between black and white women as a "violent connection"(pg 4). Not only that, Gwin’s book discusses the idea that for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, a black woman usually got subjected to displacement of sexual and mental frustration of white women. Gwin discusses how these black women, because of the sexual and mental abuse, felt looked down on more by whites and therefore reduced to even a lower level than that of white women‘s status of being a woman. . A southern white female slave owner only saw black women as another slave, or worse. White women needed to do this in order to keep themselves from feeling that they were of higher status than every one else except for their husband. White women as, Gwin describes, always proved that they had complete control and black women needed to bow to them. Gwin’s book discusses that the white male slave owners brought this onto the black women on the plantation. They would rape black women, and then instead of the white women dealing with their husbands. They would go after the black women only since the wives had no power over the husbands, but they maintained total control of the slaves, the white women would attack the black women and make their lives very diffucult. The white women would make sure that the black women understood that the white women completely hated the black women for being raped and wanted only pain for the them. This is how the black women of that time got t he stereotypes of being very sexual beings and hated by there oppressors. You can see evidence of this when Gwin discussed the realities of such hatred in the book Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner. The main character, Clytie, sexual assaults by her male master upsets her because she doesn’t desire to be involved with him, but her female master feels that she should be punished for it. So the white female slave owner... ...man keeps her from ever getting past the dark skin, and makes the white women feel more like the Africans were more of an animal then an actual person. The white women always feels that the slave must understand that the man may rank higher than her but even if her husband wants to mess around then fault goes to the slave not the husbands. And the slave will never be to her level, because the black slave will never be a lady. And in the book you can see how the white women lost there power in the house and that their system of life that they received didn’t prove to work out anymore for them so they had to attempt to adjust to a way life took would take them. I feel that Gwin argues that the main reason for the confrontations for the struggle of power became evident in that it had gotten to point that certain black women would not let their own female owners hit them. This is an example of how not only how the whites women challenged the system, but also how the slave women started to make changes in how they willed to be treated. Bibliographical citation Gwin, Minrose. Black And White Women Of The Old South. Knoxville: Tennessee Press, 1985.