Abstract
Antebellum plantation slavery was so deeply characterized by enslavers’ rape of enslaved women that in addition to inflicting trauma onto the victimized woman herself, rape constituted an open secret among the broader plantation community of the enslaved and enslavers’ families and therefore became a normalized part of southern collective consciousness (p. 4). Shannon C. Eaves's Sexual Violence and American Slavery: The Making of a Rape Culture in the Antebellum South argues that the rape of enslaved Black women established a mode of violence to which many others were subjected, opening with an exploration of the impact on Frederick Douglass of seeing his favorite aunt, Hester, facing abuse from her enslaver (pp. 2, 9). In that sense, Eaves argues that sexual violence was collective violence that enslavers used to maintain their authority (p. 3). Rape regularly occurred in the intimate, domestic spaces that enslaved people occupied, making whites privy to sexual violence that they simultaneously ignored and rationalized, allowing the act itself and the knowledge about it to form a southern rape culture (pp. 4–5).
Eaves defines rape culture as “a set of societal beliefs and ideals [that] normalize sexual violence and thus foster environments conducive to rape” (p. 6), leaning on anthropological conceptions of culture. While culture is a shared acceptance of certain behaviors, beliefs, and ideals, it can also be dynamic and transmissible over time. Sexual violence was so pervasive, combined with laws that incentivized sexual and reproductive abuses as well as stereotypes of Black women's hypersexuality, that Black women became seen as “unrapable.” This culture taught White males that rape was a reasonable way to manage their “property” and govern plantation relations, and it taught White women that there was virtue in staying silent and looking the other way even as they were angered by White men's violations (pp. 11–12).
To understand how the enslaved understood and resisted rape, Eaves carefully pored over Works Progress Administration narratives and autobiographies of the enslaved, as well as court and government documents, allowing her to illuminate enslaved voices, thoughts, feelings, and fears about rape. Enslaved people widely saw rape as a particular ill of slavery that shaped a genre of fear and anxiety; while there is still a need to subversively analyze these materials due to bondspeople's trauma-induced hesitance about speaking plainly about rape, there were also some sources that frankly exposed the horror of sexual exploitation (p. 11). Eaves contrasts this with materials from the enslavers’ perspectives, using diaries, plantation records, personal correspondence, and court and government documents that reveal White southerners’ awareness of, and at times their open frustration with, the brazenness and impropriety of sexual violence.
Sexual Violence and American Slavery is organized to show how both Black and White people understood rape and navigated a social world in which it was a constant part of plantation dynamics. Chapter One shows that rape affected people of all ages—awareness of rape began at an early age, and other bondspeople often overheard it happening or observed the aftermath. Enslaved women's bodies were “archives of time,” per Kimberly Juanita Brown (p. 20), because they bore the physical marks and pregnancies that resulted from sexual violence. Skin color therefore denoted multigenerational sexual assault since mixed-race people descended from past generations of slaves and slaveowners and symbolized that rape. Over time, enslaved people formed a set of knowledge, behaviors, and values designed to avoid, prevent, and protect themselves from rape. For example, the slaveowners’ home was seen as unsafe, but the slave quarters were also vulnerable to slaveowners’ intrusive exercising of power and control. Other ways of navigating southern rape culture were not just adjusting their behaviors but physically resisting by fighting back and even killing violators, such as Celia, who was tried and hung for killing her enslaver Robert Newsome in 1855 Missouri (pp. 39–41). Additionally, Eaves finds that enslaved people's response to rape culture was often to reconceptualize love, intimacy, marriage, and partnership to fit yet transcend the reality of circumstances shaped by violence, coercion, trauma, and separation.
Chapter Two explores the complicated terrain of long-term sexual servitude and the power dynamics that indelibly shaped even the rare situations in which enslaved women experienced modicums of freedom and privilege. Eaves attempts to elucidate enslaved women's perspectives on sexual servitude; and while it may have been true that some enslaved women viewed it as “an opportunity to potentially receive material benefits, preferential treatment, and even emancipation” (p. 57), the power to grant or deny these attempts ultimately lay with her enslaver. Several narratives that Eaves highlights demonstrate that the confines of structural power, violence, and exploitation were unrelenting even in situations that may have momentarily appeared promising for the woman and her children.
Chapter Three explores how enslaved men knew about, feared, and coped with the open abuse of the women in their lives. Primary source material affirms that enslaved men felt constrained from protecting vulnerable female family members from harm and limited in securing marriages that were free from enslavers’ violent encroachment. Such an exploration further demonstrates Eaves's argument that sexual violence mostly befell enslaved women's bodies, but it had a detrimental, traumatic effect on the entire enslaved community. Some enslaved men went to the extent of retaliating against enslavers with violence, even at the risk of their own lives, in defense of women. Eaves thus identifies the subordination of Black male masculinity under slavery as a gendered experience shaped by sexual violence.
Chapter Four contrasts the previous chapter with an examination of how White male enslavers viewed their own sexual predatoriness, and weaponized and legitimated their racist and patriarchal authority against the enslaved. Most refused to acknowledge or take accountability for their sexual behavior and its impact on women, men, children, and enslaved communities as a whole. Chapters Five and Six show that women enslavers and wives of male slaveowners were not powerless, nor were they unaware of White men's sexual relations with enslaved women. Rather, they responded in a range of ways: from private disapproval and embarrassment, to empathy and fear of their husbands’ violent nature, to public violence and spite. White women had no authority over their husbands and believed the stereotypes about Black women's sexual nature, yet flogging and selling enslaved women and their interracial children were among the punishments that White women directed, while others tolerated and accommodated their husband's activities. Through gossip, letters, diaries, and divorce filings, White women expressed their true feelings about their husbands’ and sons’ indiscretions even as they aimed to publicly maintain the façade of “civility” and status according to their class standing.
What appears to be missing from Sexual Violence and American Slavery is an opportunity to connect the behavioral dimensions of that rape culture to broader, macro-level systems to ask larger questions about the function of rape within a particular society. How does rape serve not only against the enslaved as a counterinsurgency, but also as a tool of capitalist exploitation, as Angela Davis suggests? In what ways did the plantocracy benefit from the sustained rape of enslaved women? Interracial children are often mentioned in the text, especially women who were sold as sex slaves into the “fancy trade,” but little else is provided about how enslaved women's “increase” was meant to and did increase the wealth of enslavers. These are important questions addressing issues around the central role of reproduction—often by means of rape—in advancing racial capitalism. Still, the book makes an important intervention about sexual violence as part of the afterlife of slavery. Sexual Violence and American Slavery rightly identifies evidence of a southern culture around the acceptance and silencing of the systematic rape of enslaved Black women, a pattern that would continue well into the twentieth century as the majority of Black women continued to perform domestic labor in White homes and were still vulnerable to sexual assault.