Enslaved Women and Resistance
Based on these premises, Humans in Shackles explores in especially great detail the social, cultural, and religious dimensions of the lives of bondspeople.14 The book illuminates the crucial role of enslaved women in the Americas, even though in slave societies such as Brazil bondswomen were numerically inferior to men.
This book offers a humanistic and narrative history that centers the experience of bondswomen who resisted slavery in multiple ways and emphasizes the important economic, social, and especially cultural roles of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the construction of the Americas. By taking an approach that relies on the importance of memory, I argue that the lived experiences of enslaved women are crucial to understanding slavery as well as its aftermath in the Americas.This book focuses on all forms of resistance, individual and collective, including cultural as well as violent resistance. Ultimately, I show that, through the process of affirming their humanity by preserving their languages, deities, and festivities; fighting back against their owners; and maintaining a constant dialogue with the African continent, Africans (especially African women) and their descendants played a central role in the construction of the Western Hemisphere’s social and cultural fabric.
Although most primary sources explored in this book were mediated or produced by male historical actors, I try to highlight the stories of enslaved persons to show them as protagonists and not as mere supporting figures. I show that despite having been relegated to the background of historical narratives, enslaved women were central pillars of Atlantic slavery, even if they were outnumbered by men among enslaved Africans transported to the Americas by a ratio of two to one. Enslaved women gave birth to children who were born in slavery. They nursed the offspring of their owners. They took care of the children of other bondswomen. On the cotton plantations of Louisiana in the United States or on the coffee plantations of São Paulo in Brazil, women performed strenuous physical work. In cities of Latin America and the Caribbean, such as Lima, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, and Havana, bondswomen toiled all day in the streets selling food, often in order to be able to buy the freedom of their loved ones. Enslaved women worked by cooking, cleaning, sewing, seeding, and harvesting. Slave owners sexually abused enslaved women, for whom refusing their advances could result in severe punishment. Even then, enslaved women resisted by running away, by killing their owners, or by accumulating meager sums to purchase their own freedom.