Was this when American women started talking about "equal rights"?
Notice: yahoo edits the word neggro. Just another attempt to re-write history.How did white women treat the black slaves before the civil war?
"A mistress felt that her marriage vows were desecrated, her dignity insulted; but she had no compassion for the poor victims of her husband's perfidy. She pitied herself as a martyr; she was incapable of feeling for the condition, for shame and misery in which her unfortunate, helpless slave was placed."
As a poor teen, I got a summer job.In charge ws a black man with a spanish name.Hving no rgard for me altho I was hispanic.He made all the supervisors black %26amp; all the workers wite %26amp; hspanic. evn tho I worked hrd he skiped us 4 promotion.I hated his overt reveng racism. he ws jaild 4 molesting hs kid
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How did white women treat the black slaves before the civil war?I think all men are subject to corruption when in power. If the roles were reversed, I believe that blck men would abuse other races just as much as the whites hve abused thm. I think that altho it was a horrible thing, Most blcks have come out of it a stronger %26amp; wiser people. I admire many of them.
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What is really interesting is the fact that early on in colonial America that many white women were encouraged to marry and have children with black men to increase the slave population. The white women that did so, also became slaves as well as their children. The Jim Crow Laws started as a result
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Pretty much the same as white men did ~ some good, some bad.
Women were prominent among anti slavery and underground railway workers, and other women colluded with men to continue the tradition of slavery.
Of course, it is worth remembering that married women didn't own slaves, because they weren't entitled to property of their own, but in fact no white people came out of the slavery situation looking real good, male or female.
Cheers :-)
For the most part they treated the slaves the same as the men did. Some of the women were probably worse than the men to the women because they knew their white husbands were off banging the female slaves producing little mixed children. They also may have been more cruel to them because women didn't have many rights themselves and history has shown us that if there is someone "below" us in stature we will find a way to treat them poorly just to make ourselves feel better about our own poor standing.
The flip side is that there were some women who were more caring and nurturing than most. These are the women you will hear the least about in history during the civil war. These are the women who tended to the wounds of the slaves, snuck food to the slaves when their husbands were starving them and helped deliver the babies of the female slaves. There are some of these women out there but history would rather have the world believe that everyone was a cruel slave owner during this time and that no one who owned slaves was decent to them. These people existed also. Our proof is in the old country records. after the Emancipation Proclamation, there were many slaves who chose not to leave their masters because they believed that the master was not all that bad.
well, from what i read in the history books, the masters used to have sex with the pretty big butt black slaves, so the wives were very jealous.
and i'm sure the wives treated the men just as they were, SLAVES. treated them like crap.
(thats y i respect the many black men i know who wont date white or asian women, and love black and latinos.)
no matter what, you CANNOT take away history, as much as white people want you to forget it.
I've been mulling this one over, as I don't have much detailed knowledge of this topic, but from my reading I suspect the relationships were complex, as "house slaves" had close personal relationships with the white family members. Not suggesting the white women's attitudes were anything less than colonial, and just as satisfied with the setup as their men were.
P.S. Don't speak for me, Eoghan - I am NOT "happy to benefit from the oppression, rape and slavery of indigenous and imported peoples".
EDIT: The situation was more complex than the asker implies: for instance, Sojourner Truth was a women's rights activist, an African American woman, and a former slave: http://afroamhistory.about.com/od/sojour鈥?/a>
Everyone was different. Some were mean, some were courteous and even assisted with the underground railroad. Some of the white men had sex with the black women and there were babies that soon came. Some white men beat the slaves. Like I said, everyone was different.
Like she had a choice, if she pissed off the Master, she would be kicked off the plantation (back than married women had no property rights, and there was no such thing as 50% split during divorce).
I would assume that just like the men of those times, some white women treated the slaves nicely, and others did not.
In 'America's Women: Gail Collins writes:
'In the pre-Civil War era, only about 5 percent of white Southern women actually lived on plantations and about half the Southern households owned no slaves at all. Still, slavery defined everything about life in the South, including the status of white women. Southern culture orbited around the strong father figure, simultaneously ruling and caring for his dependents - Mary Hamilton Campbell was struck when her servant Eliza refered to Campbell's husband as "our master". black and white women never seemed to develop any sense of common cuase, but every Southern female from the plantation wife to the field slave was assigned a role that involved powerlessness and the need of a white man's constant guidance.
For all their indignation about Northern abolitionists, Southern women were distinctly less enthusiastic than men about the institution of slavery. Charles Eliot Norton, a Northerner who visited Charleston in 1855, wrote home of the strangeness of hearing principled Southern men defend slavery. "It is very different with the women" he added. "Their eyes fill with tears when you talk to them about it." It could be that Norton's hostessses were simply trying to be accomodating and sympathise with their guest's harangue. But in their journals and letters, the plantation wives fequently recorded opinions that were at best mixed. "In all my life I have only met one or two womenfolk who were not abolitionists in their hearts - and hot ones, too" an overseer told Mary Chesnut, a wealthy Carolinian. Although only a handful of Southern women ever spoke out publicly against slavery, there wer a number of instances in which women surreptitiously helped their own family slaves escape. A New Orleans slave, who was being sold to Georgia traders, was freed from his handcuffs by his young mistress, who pointed out the North Star to him and told him to follow it. When a Maryland plantation owner died and the slaves were scheduled for sale to pay his debts, the dead man's granddaughter visited the slave quarters and helped them get away. In Mississippi, a fugitive slave who sught refuge with his former owner was warned by the man's wife that her husband was planning to turn him in. She gave him money and directions that led to the North. There is also some evidence that women who owned slaves were more likely to regard them as human beings. They emancipated favoured slaves in their wills more frequently than men did and seemed more sensitive to the breaking up of slave families. When they wrote to relatives who had relocated on the frontier, women often inquired by name about the slaves who hd been taken west with the settlers, something their husbands and sons almost never did. Some white women developed deep and lasting friendships with female slaves, most often the nurse who had been the family "mammy." (Susan Davis Hutchinson reported paying a condolence call on a friend upon the death of a slave "who had been more of a mother than a servant to her.")
But in general, women seemed to dislike slavery mainly because they found it difficult to handle the slave.s "I sometimes think I would not care if they did all go, they are so much trouble to me" wrote one Southern housewife in a typical outburst. Sarah Gayle, the wife of an Alabaham governor, berated herself for losing her temper with the slaves and wrote in her journal "I would be willing to spend the rest of my life at the North , where i should never see the face of another *****." Just as the Northern women complained about the difficulty of getting good servants, the southern women complained bitterly about their slaves. Absent the incentive of wages, slaves were motivated mainly by the fear of punishment, and although some white women did whip their servants, most did not really have th epower to instill physical fear. Mistresses who actually hurt slaves generally did it in the heat of anger, grabbing whatever was available - knitting needles, kitchen knife, fork, or boiling water - and sometimes permanently maiming them.
Southern women constantly pointed out that unlike northern women, they were responsible for housing and clothing their servants and tending them when they were sick. They frequently described themselves as the real slaves. Caroline Merrick, who admitted that much of the comfort of her life was due to the servants, nonethless felt "the common idea of tyranny and ill-usage of slaves was often reversed" and claimed to have been "suject at times to the exactions and dictations of the black people....which now seem almost too extraordinary to relate." Southern women felt they had to go to a great deal of trouble to look after slaves, who did not go to a great deal of trouble for them. But their claims that they wanted to see an end to the system were mostly imaginary, as demonstrated by how miserable they were when the slaves actually left. The housewives did not want to do the work themselves - they simply wanted the people who did it for them to work harder.
If Southern women ever really hated slavery, it was because they feared it was sexually corrupting their men. "Slavery degraded the white man more than the ***** and oh exerts a most delterious effect upon our children" wrote Gertrude Thomas of Georgia, who suspected that both her father and husband had black mistresses.
"God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system" wrote Mary Chesnut. Like many of her fellow Southeners, she disliked the institution but wanted the service. But on the subject of sex, her intense feeling was uncomplicated. The most famous remark in her diaries was that every Southen lady "tells you who is the father of all the mulattto children in everybody's household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends to so think." '
SOME white liberal american australian and british women are quite happy to berate men for the sins of their forefathers while benefiting from the oppression, rape and slavery of indigenous and imported peoples.
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