Despite the misfortunes of enslavement, Deborah White illustrates how black women were able to use motivation to survive and rebuild their independence as individuals. She analyzes how certain factors, such as cultural, work responsibilities, and relationships- whether sexual or familial, helped bring together the lives of black women. The cultural factors based itself around the way that African American women were raised back at home, and how it helped influence their everyday lives as slaves. The work responsibilities for women were much different than those expected of men, and even though the men have been perceived to have the harder life, the women don't fall too far behind them. The most important of the factors, were the relationships …show more content…
The slave women were raised to emphasize motherhood, so it was thought that their "duty was to bear and raise small children, a duty that was hers alone." The bondswomen had to raise their children without much help from their fathers, but lucky enough, they had help from the older women, who would assist in raising the child when the mother was working. Although they followed many of the cultural traditions that came from African-Americans, they wouldn't be able to successfully follow them all. With that being said, the "slave women developed their own female culture, that is, a way of doing things and a way of assigning value that flowed from the perspective that they had on Southern plantation life." Since all of the bondswomen had to go through much of the same things, they were able to have empathy for one another and because of that they formed "close-knit kinship relationships." This new culture that bonds-people had created throughout the slave community, "sustained black people through many trials before and after emancipation." Although the situation wasn't ideal, it forced the black women to become domestic, and instead of making slavery a negative thing, they switched gears "to make slavery a positive good," which helped them after they became …show more content…
Although it is thought that the men were the only ones doing field labor, in reality, the women had to partake in that as well. The women had to prepare the land for the crops and gardening, which was done by the men. "Thomas Nairne, an eighteenth-century South Carolina planter, expected bondwomen to do the same work as his male slaves. They would, he thought, clear, plant and hoe three acres of land in six months." As I talked about earlier, one of the African-American women's' most important responsibility was to have children. Since the slave owners knew that, they knew that they would be able to use their slaves, to produce more slaves. "In the years prior to the American Revolution, the female slave population grew more as a result of natural increase than by importation." Given that slave owners had control over the black women, they were able to force, or trick the girls into getting pregnant early on in their life, so that there would be more slaves available to work. When most mothers first have their child, they are taught to nurse and take care of their baby but the slave women were expected to get back to their field labor responsibilities. Seeing as the mothers of the newborns and young kids had to go out to the