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Assignment 03

Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery by Jennifer Morgan details the emergence of racism through distinguishing factors and features the indigenous in comparison to white European women and men (32).

In chapter one, “Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology,” Morgan references many European authors who began expeditions and constructed observations that paved way for a more savage view of the African and native women they came into contact with (43). The degradation of the African women and in turn the African men was needed in order to enslave them into forced labor for the Europeans in the Americas (28). This was known as the Transatlantic slave trade (8).

European authors and journeymen–when in contact with black women–described them as unwomanly. Only in some cases were they were able to differentiate between men and women and the only physical feature that did distinguish them were their breasts. Lynda Booze considered this a threat to the patriarchy (48).

Women were focused on to provide the distinguishing factors amongst the races. They were considered savages due to their habit of being naked constantly and the absence of marriage. They had sexual intercourse with anyone in their culture, worked while pregnant, and bore the scars of many children. In the European perspective, the lack of shame and disorder in their societies led the white Europeans to believe that these “races” they came into contact with where inferior to them (79).

One physical feature of black women that allowed the white Europeans to give support to their ideas of white supremacy and attitudes toward race were the breasts of black women, which were described as “sagging”. When working on weeds they were described as having “six legs” (43).

Women were described in various accounts as monsters and sexually dissatisfying, but sexually active enough to produce laborers. These observations and descriptions of black women produced ideas that they on equal grounds as animals and can be domesticated, thus giving reason to classify them as inferior to the white Europeans and to provide them with racial differences. (56)

How did the perspective on black women by the European narratives affect black men?