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
