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American Women In The Mid-Nineteenth-Century

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Recommended: Objectification of women

Women are seen as objects only meant from men’s use. Men a scared of intelligent women because it is not something they can control. By limiting their education men have the power to make women less than humans. Women have to deal with the cruel behavior of their husbands or in some cases their masters if they are a slave. Women in the mid-nineteenth century were thought of as a lesser human being but not as bad as slaves were because of our size and sex.
Women were taught to look beautiful and act classy if they didn’t do their feminine duties they would be exiled. They think we are only good for sexual pleasures and cooking. Sarah Grimké states, “This mode of training necessarily exalts, in their view, the animal above the intellectual and …show more content…

Women slaves were treated worse than most of the women at the time. White women had to deal with their husbands cheating on them with slaves. Female slaves had to deal with their masters abusing them if they do not comply with having sex or sometimes just hurting just for the fun of it. Sarah Grimké states, “In the daily habit of seeing the virtue of her enslaved sister sacrificed without hesitancy or remorse, she looks upon the crimes of seduction and illicit intercourse without horror, and although not personally involved in the guilt, she loses that value for innocence in her own, as well as the other sex, which is one of the strongest safeguards to virtue. She lives in habitual intercourse with men, whom she knows to be polluted by licentiousness, and often is she compelled to witness in her own domestic circle, those disgusting and heartsickening jealousies and strifes which disgraced and distracted the family of Abraham.” (1099) Female slaves were degraded by beatings, whipping, unnecessary rape by their masters just because they were a woman and were considered property. White women were disgraced by having their husbands find their sexual desires satisfied by other women who were considered not to be graced with the label of human and then having their husband’s come back and try to get with them. Women are not toys we are human beings, not dogs who heed their master’s

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During to the 18th century, women were taught they had a very specific place in a patriarchal society, and from an early age were taught how to achieve this place. Women were taught they needed to embody piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity according to Barbara Welter in her paper, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” published in 1966. A woman was told if she embodied all of these traits she would be a “true woman”. In 1798, Charles Brockden Brown published Wieland: or, The Transformation: An American Tale.

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Sexual abuse of all black women by wealthy white men was just as prevalent during emancipation as it was during slavery. The sexual abuse the enslaved black women received by their wealthy white male masters, was justified by white men and women due to the Jezebel myth they had created. Deborah Gray White defines the Jezebel myth in her reading, “Jezebel and Mammy”, when she states, "[The Jezebel] did not lead men and children to God; piety was foreign to her. She saw no advantage in prudery, indeed domesticity paled in importance before matters of the flesh” (Gray White 29). The thought of the black woman as hypersexual, allowed white men and women of all classes to sexually and racially oppress the black women, declaring them "unladylike”, not maternal figures and not sexually pure like the white women.

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In the book Ar’n’t I a women the author, Deborah Gray White, explains how the life was for the slave women in the Southern plantations. She reveals to us how the slave women had to deal with difficulties of racism as well as dealing with sexism. Slave women in these plantations assumed roles within the family as well as the community; these roles were completely different to the roles given to a traditional white female. Deborah Gray White shows us how black women had a different experience from the black men and the struggle they had to maintain their sense of womanhood against all odds, resist sexual oppression, and keep their families together. In the book the author describes two different types of women, “Jezebel” and “Mammy” they

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This proof of masculinity seems to be a more male-dominated slave experience, although women were also stripped of their individuality and autonomy. Much like their masculine counterparts, women were subject to cruel and unjust behavior. Although, they had an additional vulnerability in which men typically did not

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If they refused to accept their place, the man could correct her. Women essentially had no control over their own will. Sexism was not a new practice and men had always had the upper hand on women. “Sexism is the first, the most ancient, the most pervasive human prejudice. With the establishment of the original patriarchy in the hunter-gatherer is the With first, society the establishment and most down ancient, through of the original the most patriarchal pervasive patriarchy religions human in the Sexism prejudice” (Mankiller par.

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It’s globally known that the relationship between slaves and owners were abusive and unbalanced. Both male and female slaves endured horrible conditions and punishments brought on by their masters, but a woman’s slave-experience proves to be very different than a man’s. While women had to experience the abuse that came with their race, they also had to experience the oppression that came along with their gender. Regardless of viewing and treating them as animals, many male slave owners still had a sexual attraction and sense of protection over the female slave- sometimes even developing feelings for them. This creates a dangerous situation where not only the men have control over how the women work, but they have control over their body and emotions.

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Women were to take care of the house hold duties while the men worked. White women were unable to remarry after divorce, while slaves were not given an option to marry at all. No matter your race, there were no voting rights for women. As African American women they were to raise the children and often did it alone, cook, clean as well as working and laboring hard in the fields. African American women were sexually assaulted by their white masters and often beat by the white women of the house for “allowing” them to do such.

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