Slave Girl

Product Information

Women and children slaves, dressed in new clothes, wait to be sold in Richmond, Virginia, in the 19th century. Carol Berkin, "African American Women and the American Revolution," Revolutionary Mothers, New York, 2005, 121. No longer servants to slave owners, black women were contractual servants to their husbands due to the patriarchal principles governing the role of women in marriage.

The uniqueness of the African-American female's situation is that she stands at the crossroads of two of the most well-developed ideologies in America, that regarding women and that regarding the Negro. John Mullanphy noted that he had lived with him a four-year-old mulatto girl, whom he willed to the Sisters of Charity in the event of his death. And yet, here we are, more than a century and a half on from supposedly ending slavery, still refusing to admit that the United States of America was built on the literal backs of human beings. Such a collar may be a piece of neckwear, or may be a bracelet or other piece of jewelry that symbolizes slave status.The slave master or mistress might be any person or group, though the majority of such relationships are usually either one dominant, or a committed dominant couple, owning one or more slaves.

In some traditional rituals, after signing a slave contract, the commitment to the relationship is celebrated by a collaring ceremony, which can be simple or elaborate, often witnessed by invited friends. In the years before the American Revolution, the female slave population grew mainly as a result of natural increase and not importation. When loyalist plantations were captured, enslaved women were often taken and sold for the soldiers' profit. The master ran out of the room, mounted his horse and rode off to escape, ‘though well he knew that [his wife’s] full fury would fall upon the young head of his victim. Used on plantations in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, most slaves were originally from tribes in West Africa.

Chained below decks, most slaves were transported across the Atlantic without ever seeing the waves or smelling the salty fresh air. This text was originally featured on our GirlSpeak podcast in 2018, written and recorded by former Junior Girl Elizabeth Boyle.

Songs speak of families being torn apart and the emotional turmoil that enslaved women were put through by slavery. Story of a black woman in the South who was born into slavery in the 1850s and lives to become a part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. In the South, the immediate legacy of the Revolution was increased manumission by slaveholders in the first two decades after the war.As house slaves, women were domestic servants: cooking, sewing, acting as maids, and rearing the planter's children.