of her powerful owner and bring on her censure and ruin.
The expensive gowns which adorned the lady, her leisure,
and her vacuity have obscured for many the cold, hard reality
of her status as carnal chattel. Since her function was to signify male wealth, it is often assumed that she possessed that wealth. In fact, she was a breeder and an ornament, with no
private or political rights, with no claim either to dignity or
freedom.
The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics
which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a
common condition, and make united rebellion against the
oppressor inconceivable. The power of the master is absolute
and incontrovertible. His authority is protected by civil law,
armed force, custom, and divine and/or biological sanction.
Slaves characteristically internalize the oppressor’s view of
them, and this internalized view congeals into a pathological
self-hatred. Slaves typically learn to hate the qualities and
behaviors which characterize their own group and to identify
their own self-interest with the self-interest of their oppressor.
The master’s position at the top is invulnerable; one aspires to
become the master, or to become close to the master, or to be
recognized by virtue of one’s good service to the master. Resentment, rage, and bitterness at one’s own powerlessness cannot be directed upward against him, so it is all directed
against other slaves who are the living embodiment of one’s
own degradation.
Among women, this dynamic works itself out in what Phyllis Chesler has called “harem politics. ”3 The first wife is tyrant over the second wife who is tyrant over the third wife, etc.
The authority of the first wife, or any other woman in the
harem who has prerogatives over other women, is a function
of her powerlessness in relation to the master. The labor that
she does as a fuck and as a breeder can be done by any other
woman of her gender class. She, in common with all other
women of her abused class, is instantly replaceable. This
means that whatever acts of cruelty she commits against other
women are done as the agent of the master. Her behavior
inside the harem over and against other women is in the interest of her master, whose dominance is fixed by the hatred of women for each other.
Inside the harem, removed from all access to real power,
robbed of any possibility of self-determination, all women
typically act out on other women their repressed rage against
the master; and they also act out their internalized hatred of
their own kind. Again, this effectively secures the master’s
dominance, since women divided against each other will not
unite against him.
In the domain of the owner of black slaves, the white
woman was the first wife, but the master had many other concubines, actually or potentially—black women slaves. The
white wife became her husband’s agent against these other
carnal chattel. Her rage against her owner could only be taken
out on them, which it was, often ruthlessly and brutally. Her
hatred of her own kind was acted out on those who, like her,
were carnal chattel, but who, unlike her, were black. She also,
of course, aggressed against her own white daughters by binding and shackling them as ladies, forcing them to develop the passivity of ornaments, and endorsing the institution of marriage.
Black women slaves, on whose bodies the carnage of white
male dominance was visited most savagely, had lives of unrelieved bitterness. They did backbreaking labor; their children were taken from them and sold; they were the sexual servants
of their masters; and they often bore the wrath of white
women humiliated into cruelty by the conditions of their own
servitude.
Harem politics, the self-hatred of the oppressed which
wreaks vengeance on its own kind, and the tendency of the
slave to identify her own self-interest with the self-interest of
the master— all conspired to make it impossible for white
women, black women, and black men to understand the astonishing similarities in their conditions and to unite against their common oppressor.
Now, there are many who believe that changes occur in
society because of disembodied processes: they describe
change in terms of technological advances; or they paint giant
pictures of abstract forces clashing in thin air. But I think that
we as women know that there are no disembodied processes;
that all history originates in human flesh; that all oppression is
inflicted by the body of one against the body of another; that
all social change is built on the bone and muscle, and out of
the flesh and blood, of human creators.
Two such creators were the Grimke sisters of Charleston,
South Carolina. Sarah, bom in 1792, was the sixth of fourteen
children; Angelina, bom in 1805, was the last. Their father
was a rich lawyer who owned numerous black slaves.
Early in her childhood, Sarah rebelled against her own
condition as a lady and against the ever-present horror of
black slavery. Her earliest ambition was to become a lawyer,
but education was denied her by her outraged father who
wanted her only to dance, flirt, and marry. “With me learning
was a passion, ” she wrote later. “My nature [was] denied her
appropriate nutriment, her course counteracted, her aspirations crushed. ”4 In her adolescence, Sarah conscientiously defled the Southern law that prohibited teaching slaves to
read. She gave reading lessons in the slave Sunday school until
she was discovered by her father; and even after that, she
continued to tutor her own maid. “The light was put out, ” she
wrote, “the keyhole screened, and flat on our stomachs, before
the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the
laws of South Carolina. ”5 Eventually, this too was discovered,
and understanding that the maid would be whipped for further
infractions, Sarah ended the reading lessons.
In 1821, Sarah left the South and went to Philadelphia. She
renounced her family’s Episcopal religion and became a
Quaker.
Angelina, too, could not tolerate black slavery. In 1829, at
the age of twenty-four, she wrote in her diary: “That system
must be radically wrong which can only be supported by
transgressing the laws of God. ”6 In 1828, she too moved to
Philadelphia.
In 1835, Angelina wrote a personal letter to William Lloyd
Garrison, the militant abolitionist. She wrote: “The ground
upon which you stand is holy ground: never—never surrender
it. If you surrender it, the hope of the slave is extinguished.. . .
[I]t is my deep, solemn deliberate conviction, that this is a