This study will provide a summary and critical review of Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I A Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South.
White in this book is trying to bring into the public consciousness the suffering endured by female slaves in the slavery-dependent South. She says that most studies of slavery focus, either deliberately or subliminally, on the male slave. And those "few scholars who study black women fail to note that black women suffer a double oppression: that shared by all African-Americans and that shared by most women" (23). With respect to slavery specifically, White says many scholars conclude that female slaves were better treated than male slaves. In fact,
most black women of the time plowed, planted, and hoed, did as much work as a man, endured the brutal punishment meted out by slaveholders and their overseers, and also fulfilled her ordained role of motherhood (14).
Another important theme of White's is that the accomplishments and endurances of the female slave stand in stark rebuke to the argument that the female is the weaker of the sexes. Writing of the tremendous suffering of one such slave, Sojourner Truth, White says that "Judged by her life experience, all theories of inequality based on the assumption that women were weaker than men . . . were false." In fact, White writes, female slaves, "more than any group of American women . . . proved daily that sexual discrimination based on such assumptions was not justified" (14).
White sees the female slave and the modern black woman as pillars of society, and she aims to help gain for them their rightful recognition in history and in the culture today. Black women were cheated out of their identity in American history, they have been neglected by historians, and they continue to be treated as second-class citizens today: "Despite all that she has come through and accomplished, the American black woman is still waiting for an affirmative...