In the last twenty years, studies in Afro-American slavery have given special attention to the slave community
and culture. They have emphasized the slaves' control over
their lives, while glossing over the brutality of the
institution of slavery. Slave women have been ignored until
very recently, and those few historians who studied their
lives have applied the same categories of inquiry used by
traditional historians with a male perspective. The topic
of interracial sexual relations crystallizes this problem.
This issue has been left aside in most scholarly studies and,
when mentioned, addressed more often than not from a male
perspective. As sexual abuse, it exemplifies the harshness
of slavery.
The oral slave narratives, often referred to by the same
historians, are one of the few primary sources by and on
slave women. Yet, historians have not used them adequately
in research on slave women, primarily because of inadequate
conceptual frameworks.
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