price of passage from England; then, as men began to accrue
wealth, for larger sums, paid to merchants who sold women as
if they were potatoes.
Women were imported into the colonies to breed. Just as a
man bought land so that he could grow food, he bought a wife
so that he could grow sons.
A man owned his wife and all that she produced. Her crop
came from her womb, and this crop was harvested year after
year until she died.
According to law, a man even owned a woman’s unborn
children. He also owned any personal property she might have
— her clothing, hairbrushes, all personal effects however insignificant. He also, of course, had the right to her labor as a domestic, and owned all that she made with her hands— food,
clothing, textiles, etc.
A man had the right of corporal punishment, or “chastisement” as it was then called. Wives were whipped and beaten for disobedience, or on whim, with the full sanction of law and
custom.
A wife who ran away was a fugitive slave. She could be
hunted down, returned to her owner, and brutally punished by
being jailed or whipped. Anyone who aided her in her escape,
or who gave her food or shelter, could be prosecuted for robbery.
Marriage was a tomb. Once inside it, a woman was civilly
dead. She had no political rights, no private rights, no personal rights. She was owned, body and soul, by her husband.
Even when he died, she could not inherit the children she had
birthed; a husband was required to bequeath his children to
another male who would then have the full rights of custody
and guardianship.
Most white women, of course, were brought to the colonies
as married chattel. A smaller group of white women, however,
were brought over as indentured servants. Theoretically, indentured servants were contracted into servitude for a specified amount of time, usually in exchange for the price of passage. But, in fact, the time of servitude could be easily extended by the master as a punishment for infraction of rules
or laws. For example, it often happened that an indentured
servant, who had no legal or economic means of protection by
definition, would be used sexually by her master, impregnated,
then accused of having borne a bastard, which was a crime.
The punishment for this crime would be an additional sentence of service to her master. One argument used to justify this abuse was that pregnancy had lessened the woman’s usefulness, so that the master had been cheated of labor. The woman was compelled to make good on his loss.
Female slavery in England, then in Amerika, was not structurally different from female slavery anywhere else in the world. The institutional oppression of women is not the
product of a discrete historical time, nor is it derived from a
particular national circumstance, nor is it limited to Western
culture, nor is it the consequence of a particular economic
system. Female slavery in Amerika was congruent with the
universal character of abject female subjugation: women were
carnal chattel; their bodies and all their biological issue were
owned by men; the domination of men over them was systematic, sadistic, and sexual in its origins; their slavery was the base on which all social life was built and the model from
