How Men and Women Challenged the Restrictions of the Slave Plantation
How Men and Women Challenged the Restrictions of the Slave Plantation
Since the arrival of Europeans the Caribbean islands have been going through constant change. The loss of native peoples and the introduction of the plantation system had immediate and permanent repercussions on the islands. The Plantation system set up a society that consisted of a large, captive lower class and a powerful, wealthy upper class. In order to understand slavery it is essential to recognize that it’s introduction to the Caribbean was driven by colonizers need for economic expansion and development. As the plantation systems became successful labor was needed in order to progress, slavery became the answer that caused exploitation and hardships that the men and women slaves had to encounter. This led the slaves to challenge these restrictions through the use of resistance and rebelling in order to survive the slave planation.
The slaves tried to resist these mistreatments by trying to escape from being a slave and being treated unfairly. The slaves were having a very hard time adjusting to this new life that was brought upon them where they had no freedom and were treated very badly. This led some slaves to instead of rebelling against the colonizers to hurting themselves as a form of revenge or just not to be a slave. An example of this is found in the Lewis (1983, p. 162-163) article where the slaves would participate in self-mutilation and self-inflicted illness or injury as an expression of revenge and a way to get out of slavery. Some ways that the slaves participated in self-mutilation was poisoning, also seen as the most used tactic to seek revenge on the masters or just to commit suicide. The slaves would find ways to execute themselves either through poison, hanging or through jumping off the slave ships. Poison was either self-inflicted or used on other slaves that were seen as the most valuable to the master in order to show resistance and to run away from being under control of the masters. Also many women experienced unsafe crude abortion just to avoid enslavement at birth of their offspring. The enslaved women did not want to use their bodies for reproductive labour willingly they used different strategies to undermine the slavery system through malingering, lying, stealing, poisoning and running away (Shepherd, 2001, p. 180).
The Essay on Plantation Crops and the Slavery System
Plantation crops and the slavery system changed between 1800 and 1860 because of the industrial revolution. After the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, the Southern states were granted freedom to decide about the legality of slavery. At this point in time, the cotton production was very low and there were around 700,000 slaves in the whole country. Cotton changed the course of the American ...
These are just some ways in which the men and women slaves tried to show resistance and tried to run away from being treated as a slave due to the fact that being forced to work on the plantation and being treated unfairly was too much for them to handle.t They would rather take their own lives and lives of their offspring just so they would not have to suffer from the mistreatment. Some would even run away where they created a little community far away from the plantation and away from the whites, which was called maroonage. On the other hand some of the slave population realized “under harsh pressures of the system that a degree of acceptance was necessary for the sake of an easy life, those who openly rebelled were always a minority, because the penalty of rebelling was death” (Lewis, 1983, p 161).
The slaves realizing that they must fight back and not give up which started to develop ways that they started to challenge the restrictions held upon them by the white masters and overseers. The slaves learned that to survive the daily experience of the plantation life they would have to rebel using ignorance, sabotage, suicide, wit, poisoning of masters and many more strategies (Lewis, 1983 p. 160).
The Term Paper on Slave Resistance White Man
May 2, 2002 Resistance to Slavery and Race Oppression Slavery in the early eighteenth century was horrible for African Americans. Men were being killed, women were being raped and children were being sold. To avoid the unjust treatment of slavery, slaves did the unthinkable. Some ran away, others killed their masters, and women even killed their own children. What were they trying to accomplish by ...
The slaves rebelled by the acts of not cooperating with the masters and overseers through lazy work habits, petty theft, sabotage and insubordination which is called malingering (Lewis, 1983 p. 163).
The use of malingering was to show that they were protesting and were not going to give up. The masters and overseers did not see this as a protest though they believed that the slave workers were just lazy and unwise. The was a rebellion referred to as the ‘petticoat rebellion’ it is a metaphor for enslaved women’s resistance, due to the fact that women as well as men were rebelling by deceiving the overseers and using different strategies to undermine the plantation system (Shepherd, 2001, p 177).
They also used reenactment of slavocracy “myth of the friendly master” (Lewis, 1983 p. 163).
What this meant was to use flattery towards the master that plays out the ideal expectation from the master. For instance the masters have these ideals that they are kings and the slaves should worship them if they want to survive. The slaves were being clever by feeding the master with lies by letting the masters believe they think they are kings, they did this in order to survive on the planation. The only way they knew how to survive the crucial hardships on the plantation was to out wit or out smart the masters and overseers. The slaves came up with different strategies in order to survive such as playing the stereotype, the slaves decided to play out the certain stereotypes that the masters had about them in order to use it for their own benefit (Lewis, 1983, p. 164).
The masters had these expectations of the salves being unwise and lazy which lead the slaves to deliberately act out these expectations. Little did the masters know that it was really a disguise of disrespect and a disguise for their true feelings towards their masters. In other words the slaves were just playing games and deceiving the masters, an example of this was through the songs that they sung. The whites thought of these songs as a sign of weakness, but in fact they were used by the slaves to mock the weakness of the whites. The way the slaves outwit the whites developed into a folklore story about Anansi the trickster spider who was seen as weak creature who outwits the oppressor, this story is in relation to how the slaves out smarts the whites. Therefore, the master treated the slaves as fools, so the slave responded by acting the fool.
The Term Paper on Black Woman Harlem White Women
The People, Leisure, and Culture of Blacks During the Harlem Renaissance It seems unfair that the pages of our history books or even the lecturers in majority of classrooms speak very little of the accomplishments of blacks. They speak very little of a period within black history in which many of the greatest musicians, writers, painters, and influential paragon' emerged. This significant period ...
Language was another strategy the slaves used for resistance and rebellion it was a key element to their survival. Their language became a way for them to communicate with each other without the white masters and overseers understanding. The slaves used language, song and dance to their advantage by confusing the higher authorities and as a mechanism used to provoke and tease the whites. The enslaved women used their voices in and used their voices to curse those who oppressed them. An example from the article by Shepherd (2001, p.181) the author Mary Gaunt wrote about a woman named Maria used tongue and body language to abuse her purchaser to voice her injustice. This just shows how powerful language is even though when the women stood up for themselves they knew it would come with consequences being beaten or even killed, but all they cared about was proving that they will not withstand for this mistreat anymore. The slaves also never gave up on their culture they kept it alive through their songs and dances the slave entertainment culture grew throughout the plantation society they would sing and dance with lots of energy, they would try and make the best out of their situation.
Women were not recognized enough during the slave plantation but women were just as powerful as the male slaves, without the women the slave emancipation would have existed. Women actually outnumbered the men in the fields and did the majority of domestic work such as being nurses. The women did the same work as men even though at times men had a wider range of tasks to do. Women suffered a lot of exploitation and dehumanization due to the fact that women’s bodies were mentally, physically and sexually abused (Shepherd, 2001, p.179).
The masters took advantage of the women since they were seen as poor, helpless woman that were there for work and for pleasure. Women were open to sexual abuse-sexploitation since their bodies were being exploited and they were being sold for sex (Shepherd, 2001, p.179).
The Essay on Black Women Slave Men Slaves
The writings of Harriet Jacobs and Sojourner Truth exemplify that the sufferings of black women were far worst than that of their male counterparts. All slaves were forced to endure the physical and emotional turmoil of bondage, however, for the enslaved woman, race and gender presented a double oppression. Women slaves experienced peculiar wrongs and injustices to which men slaves were not ...
The women had to do a lot of physical labour in the field plantation and doing domestic work, Shepherd expressed that “under the slavery system of domination women suffered ultra-exploitation. Their bodies became the site of power contestation, as field labourers and as domestics”(Shepherd, 2001, p. 179).
This domination took a toll on themselves and their bodies to the point where they realized they have to come together and resist and rebel against the whites. The men and women worked together in trying to emancipate slavery by using different tactics, for example the enslaved women in Jamaica were involved in putting together violent plots to rebel against the whites. They came up with a plan to set fire to the properties to parish or the huts that the whites were in. The women played an active role in the fight to freedom by risking their lives and the lives of others just to be free. For example in Shepherd article the woman were very strategic and manipulative, for instance they had poisoned the food that the soldiers had to eat, a women led the soldiers away for the rest to get away. This is what started the emancipation act in 1833 of the slavery plantation since both men and women slaves started working together they became stronger in power and their resistance and rebellion against slavery to create a better society.
The slaves went through all these hardships and challenges but they were very smart and brave to resist and rebel in order to be free again and shape a new separate life, a new self-identity and a new world. One thing about the slaves during the slavery they never gave up even when they felt like giving up fully they tried to make the best out of a situation by still continuing their culture through the dances, songs and language. In other words they came up with an alternative life-style through what they learned from the slave experiences that developed their own independent world of culture such as dance, language, song, religion. Being free from the slavery planation was not easy but their main goal was to be free and to create a new society in the Caribbean, they took their past experiences and learned from it and made them stronger and it is what shaped them today. The reason why they rebelled and resisted the slavery was to prepare them for the fight for freedom and to become a better society.
The Essay on Woman in the Life of African
The life of nineteenth century African American women was marred by an unfortunate social practice called slavery. While such unjust living condition affected both men and women, the harmful impact was more on women. This is because in the context of slavery, it was the women who suffered worse and the ones who were subjected to more damaging treatment than men. Coupled with race-related burdens, ...
References
Lewis, G. (1983).
“The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: The antislavery ideology.” In P. Taylor and M. Wood(Eds.), Humanities 2310 Course Kit (pp. 159-176). Fall/Winter 2012-2013. Toronto: York University Bookstore, 2012.
Shepherd, V. (2001).
“ ‘Petticoat rebellion?’ the black woman’s body and voice in the struggles for freedom in colonial Jamaica.” In P. Taylor and M. Wood(Eds.), Humanities 2310 Course Kit (pp. 177-188).
Fall/Winter 2012-2013. Toronto: York University Bookstore, 2012.
