Resistance - A Fabric of Daily Existence

Blog - Week 11 

Crushing the stereotype of the black matriarch, Angela Davis sheds light on the perspective that black women transformed resistance into a “fabric of daily existence”. A patriarchal documentation of history often tends to oversee this. This removes women from history in a way that not only are their struggles undermined, but their oppression is exacerbated as they are made to feel invisible ‘nobodys’ in a war between black men and white men. In fact, the story of women’s repression and resistance indicates how the resistance of women was a major threat to slavery. As a result, oppression of women became fundamental to the survival of slavery. This blog will explore how that is so. 

Women executed forms of resistance that might be considered small in magnitude as opposed to large-scale revolts, but became part of everyday life in such a way that they actively threatened the slave-masters. For instance, black women often poisoned the food and set fire to the houses of their masters. Open refusal to obey was another form of resistance. Davis narrates the instances from Lousinia, South Carolina, and Virgina where destruction of property, murders and planned rebellions against masters occured. Faking illness, slowing down in work and destroying crops were also modes of resistance. Considering that most slave women were employed as domestic workers in their masters’ household, such resistance was even more threatening to the slave-masters. Black women were in close proximity to masters, thus, their ability to harm them increased. Moreover, these acts of resistance had the ability to encourage other women to follow suit. Furthermore, the nature of these acts were such that they became a form of everyday life. This meant that compared to revolts, they were much more frequent and required less organization, resources and planning.Hence, these became effective and crucial threats to the institution of slavery. They not only threatened the lives of the slave-masters, but also the profits they were gaining from the slave system, as Davis states.

The strict response of slave-masters against women further indicates how strong this threat was. The punishment for these acts was extremely strict, often stricter than men’s e.g. men were hanged but women were burned alive for the same crime. Furthermore, the use of sexual violence and abuse against women massively increased. Reducing her to the level of her “biological being”, the master attempted to establish her as a “female animal” to “destroy her proclivities towards resistance”. Moreover, sexual violence has often been linked to the idea of destroying a woman and her entire community’s honor. Thus, such punishments served to severely deter all women from resisting. Davis terms these acts by the master as a form of “counter-insurgency” and ”terrorist methods designed to dissuade other black women from following the examples of their fighting sisters”. Had such acts of resistance by women been trivial in nature, we would not have seen such a strict response from slave-masters. But when we see punishments that were intended for public spectacle, we see that they were used as a means of deterrence against further acts of resistance.  

However, we must also keep in mind the qualification Davis makes. She explains how the portrait of resistance cannot be applied to every woman. There were some who were indifferent, some were traitors and others who did not realize their potential. Yet, these were not the vast majority. The vast majority engaged in these acts of resistance that were a crucial blow to slavery. Their struggle must be recognized and valued as such. Davis also reminds us how most resistance attempts were unsuccessful or were eventually thwarted. Yet, there were numerous successes. Moreover, considering that majority of women engaged in resistance and these incidents were frequent, we should consider their struggle to be of extreme significance in countering slavery.