"I had resolved that I would be virtuous, though I was a slave": Enslaved Women, Feminine Virtue and the Sexual Economy of US Slavery

Abstract

Abstract: This article traces the powerful currency of notions of feminine virtue among enslaved women in the antebellum US South. Early nineteenth-century white American ideas of "female virtue" were limited to white womanhood and legitimized US white supremacist and patriarchal imperialism. Exploited for their reproductive and productive labor, enslaved women were denied the assumption of feminine virtue. Rather, they were positioned at the center of slavery's sexual economy. Yet, enslaved women developed a transnational and multifaceted understanding of feminine virtue that they enlisted and passed on to their daughters as a form of subversion. This article argues that enslaved women's concerns with and actions around virtue reveals a strategy through which they struggled for sexual autonomy.