- How does this reading add to your knowledge of the subject, or challenge or contradict what you previously thought about this aspect of American or global history?
Black women under the context of racism and misogyny have and continue to experience discrimination and violence at the hands of both men and women, who, in society’s’ standards, prove to be superior to them whether it be in terms of race or gender. White women, being that they are one of the main enforcers of such an issue encountered by Black women, although are faced with inarguable challenges due to the fact that they are women existing in a patriarchal society, are otherwise liberated in the fact that they are White. In this way can, White women enable acts of aggression or discrimination amongst individuals of varying races, and so they have. In fact, as of, in our modern world, in many pre-dominantly White feminist spaces where the seemingly harmless and rather empowering notion of “women needing to stick together” or “women supporting women” is routinely brought up in a performative manner, conversations surrounding the struggles of Women of Color or Black women are also constantly being deliberately distorted or outright silenced by such self-proclaimed White feminists, who in their radical beliefs concerning women’s rights, in most cases, also, fail to consider equality amongst women of color and Black women.Therefore, historically speaking, it comes as no shock to me, as indicated and supported in “Out of the House of Bondage, Ch. 1, The Gender of Violence” by Thavolia Glymph, that my knowledge that White women have hid behind, weaponized and profited off of their idealized sense of womanhood (being that they are seen as soft, delicate, caring and harmless etc.) while simultaneously partaking in the violent reinforcement of the institution of slavery and white supremacy against their Black women counterparts during the Antebellum era of the American South stands correct. An example of this can be seen in the upholding ideology or rather mythos that the ladies and/or mistresses of such a slaveholding society as ours in the 17th to 19th century, were deemed graceful, “…a positive influence on the slave system,…[and] the best friends slaves could hope to have.” (Glymph 23-24), when, it has been noted in slave testimonials, mainly brought up by formerly enslaved Black women, that “…slave mistresses had in fact slapped, hit, and even brutally whipped their slaves – particularly slave women or children,…” (Glymph, 26). This example, adds onto my previously stated knowledge on the dynamics between White women and racism as it demonstrates the contradicting perspectives surrounding their involvement in and maintenance of the institution of slavery during the Antebellum era of the American South, which on one hand wrongfully depicts White women as compassionate and harmless, while rightfully, on the other, as calculating, spiteful and possibly worse than their, slave-master husbands, in regards to their treatment of their enslaved Black men and specifically women subjects.
A powerful and deeply-felt post. For the purposes of these write-ups, however, it may be helpful to introduce the work and its arguments first, before delving into more general and abstract assertions about the relationship between race and gender. You might also consider breaking them up into paragraphs organized around main ideas.
You do an admirable job of spelling out the gist of Glymph’s argument by using carefully selected quotes, but as a historian (for the purposes of this class) you might also want to think about how she is using evidence, and how her argument is making an intervention into the historiography of feminist work on slavery and plantation households specifically—an interpretation that challenges the existing literature, rather than a definitive generalization about the role of white women in slavery.