Leslie: The Barber

...a share worthy bit.

In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1867), Jacobs mentions how planters’ daughters would take advantage of male slaves.

They know that the women slaves are subject to their father's authority in all things; and in some cases they exercise the same authority over the men slaves. I have myself seen the master of such a household whose head was bowed down in shame; for it was known in the neighborhood that his daughter had selected one of the meanest slaves on his plantation to be the father of his first grandchild. She did not make her advances to her equals, nor even to her father's more intelligent servants. She selected the most brutalized, over whom her authority could be exercised with less fear of exposure.

Even if the young white woman in this story did not consider herself a sexual assaulter (which she probably did not), this is clearly sexually predatory behavior. The kind of relationship described here, which Jacobs suggests was not uncommon, cannot be classified as consensual in any meaningful sense of the word, and in fact constitutes a form of sexual abuse, if not rape. We thus see that plantation mistresses and elite women, like their male counterparts, were able to sexually control and abuse their slaves.

Another way in which white women were able to exercise sexual control over slaves was by threatening to accuse them of rape or attempted rape if they did not agree to sex (Hodes, pp. 39, 40, 43, 46, 135).4 In doing this, elite white women used one of the primary instruments of patriarchal repression—the idea that that they were weak and in need of white male protection, and by extension, in need of control and domination by white men—to exercise racial control over slaves. Instead of attempting to dismantle the white patriarchal hegemony that oppressed both slaves and (to a lesser extent) white women, predatory white women who coerced slaves into sex through threat of rape opted to perpetuate both white supremacy and patriarchy, by reinforcing paternalistic notions of female sexuality.