Mistress and Mammy: The Family in Slavery 10.3.23

• HIS 379 The Family in America
• Year 4

Between Mistress and Mammy: 

The Family in Slavery

The History of Family in America (HIST 379)
Dr. Caitlin Wiesner
Main Hall Room 213
October 3, 2023

Family Oral History Project Selections and Goals due on Blackboard before class on Tuesday, October 10th 

Please submit a Word Document that contains the following information for planning your Family Oral History Project:

1. The names of at least three (3) family members who you intend to interview
2. A brief explanation of how this person is related to you and why you decided to include them in your project
3. A brief statement of your goals in conducting this Family Oral History Project. What do you hope to learn or uncover about your family or the American past by conducting these interviews, and why?
4. A list of at least five (5) questions that you will ask each of your interview subjects, plus three (3) "probing" questions that you will use if the results of your original five questions are unsatisfactory.
   
5. A schedule for conducting and recording interviews.

Be prepared to share your Selections and Questions Sheet with the class on Tuesday, October 10th

Be sure to create a Google Drive Folder to archive your interview recordings and transcripts and add me as a viewer (cwiesner @mercy.edu)

oralhistory.org

Enslaved Women: Jezebel

• "Naturally" sexually promiscuous and immodest
• Like their white mistresses, they were responsible for reproductive labor (making more slaves), but unlike their white mistresses they were also responsible for productive labor (raising more cotton) 
  

Enslaved Women:

Mammy

• The trusted Mammy expertly ran the household, adored the white children she raised
• Loyal, maternal, and, above all else, asexual.
• Demonstrated the "beneficial" impact of slavery upon Black women who were  immoral "Jezebel"
  

The Plantation Mistress

• "Carnal" --> "Passionless"
  
• Daughters inherited slaves from their fathers upon marriage
• Household managers
  
• Lizzie Anna Burwell of Lynesville, North Carolina informed her father that her slave Fanny "vexed" her and demanded that he "cut Fanny's ears off and get her a new maid from Clarksville"
  
• Henrietta King, enslaved in Virginia, recalled her punishment after she stole a piece of candy at age eight:" De gal come an’ took dat strap like her mother tole her an’ commence to lay it on real hard whilst Missus holt me"
  

Fictive Kin: Recognizing as caregivers as family, despite lacking a biological relationship

“During slavery it seemed like your children belong to everybody but you”

- Caroline Hunter (Enslaved in Virginia)

"Durin' slavery there were stockmen. They was weighed and tested. A man would rent the stockman and put him in a room with some young women he wanted to raise children from."

- Maggie Stenhouse 

(Enslaved in Arkansas)

"Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of the mulatto children in everybody's household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds."

- Mary Boykin Chesnut 

(Slaveholder in South Carolina)

“He had that old bull whip flung across his shoulder, and Lawd, that man could hit so hard! So I jes said “yassur, I guess so’ and tried to hide my face so I couldn’t see Sam’s nakedness, but he made me look at him anyhow. Well, he told us what we must get busy and do in his presence, and we had to do it. After that we were considered man and wife. Me and Sam was a healthy pair and had fine, big babies, so I never had another man forced on me. Sam was kind to me and I learnt to love him.”

- Louisa Everett (Enslaved in Virginia)

Marriage in Slavery

Matrifocality (children are raised in households headed by one or more women without consistent presence of their fathers)

Polygamy (slaves are married to more than one person at a time)

Abroad spouses (slaves live separately from their spouses)

Nearly 1/3rd of all slave marriages in mid-19th century South Carolina were abroad.  

Discuss: Harriet Jacobs, “A New Tie to Life” (1861)

• Why would Jacobs choose to become Sawyer’s concubine?
• What feelings does Jacobs express about becoming a mother while enslaved?
• Why was Jacobs’ autobiography effective as a piece of abolitionist literature?
  

Harriet Jacobs (pseudonym Linda Brent), 1894

Discuss: Levi Coffin Recalls Margaret Garner's Trial (1856)

• What was at issue in the 1856 trial of Margaret Garner?
• How did motherhood factor into Margaret Garner’s relationship to slavery? 
• How did her enslaved motherhood compare to Harriet Jacobs’?
  

"The faded faces of the Negro children tell too plainly to what degradation the female slaves submit. Rather than give her daughter to that life, she killed it. If in her deep maternal love she felt the impulse to send her child back to God, to save it from coming woe, who shall say she had no right to do so?"

- Lucy Stone's testimony at Margaret Garner's Trial (1856)

A fact is an objective and incontrovertible piece of information.
Evidence is the application of one or more facts to support an argument.
An argument is a subjective claim made to expand an area of knowledge.

We will begin discussion of readings each class with an FAQ (Fact, Argument, Question) Exercise. All students will free write the following:

     A fact that stood out to you in the reading (please include page number)
    An explanation of how that fact works as evidence for the historian’s argument
    A question that the reading raised for you

A fact is an objective and incontrovertible piece of information.
Evidence is the application of one or more facts to support an argument.
An argument is a subjective claim made to expand an area of knowledge.

FAQ (Fact, Argument, Question) Exercise

All students will free write the following:

1.  A fact that stood out to you in the reading (please include page number)
2. An explanation of how that fact works as evidence for the historian’s argument
3. A question that the reading raised for you

Nancy Cott, Public Vows, Chapters 6-9

1. How did laws governing immigration in the late 19th intersect with the politics of marriage? According to these laws, what constituted consent in marriage and what did not?
2. How did laws and policies enacted in the early 20th century give economic meaning to marriage? Was this economic meaning distinct from earlier understandings of marriage? 
3. To what extent did the Second World War change the American marriage model? 
4. What caused the “disestablishment” of the lifelong Christian monogamy model of marriage since the 1970s? How have different social groups responded to this disestablishment in the 21st century?