The next Seminar of the Society for the History of American Women will host Kaisha Esty, Assistant professor at Wesleyan University: "’I had resolved that I would be virtuous, though I was a slave’: Enslaved Women, Feminine Virtue and the Sexual Economy of US Slavery" on 5 March 2024, 6:00PM – 7:00PM (London Time)
The seminar is free but booking is required to have access to the zoom link and password ("Book now") on the following link:
You will also find on the link other upcoming seminars of the Gender and History in the Americas, held in collaboration with the Institute of Historical Research.
"’I had resolved that I would be virtuous, though I was a slave’: Enslaved Women, Feminine Virtue and the Sexual Economy of US Slavery"
This paper traces the powerful currency of notions of feminine virtue among enslaved women in the antebellum US South. Early nineteenth-century white American ideas of ‘female virtue’ were limited to white womanhood and legitimized US white supremacist and patriarchal imperialism. Exploited for their reproductive and productive labor, enslaved women were denied the assumption of feminine virtue. Rather, they were positioned at the center of slavery’s sexual economy. Yet, enslaved women developed a transnational and multifaceted understanding of feminine virtue that they enlisted and pass down to their daughters as a form of subversion. This article argues that enslaved women’s concerns with and actions around virtue reveals a strategy through which they struggled for sexual autonomy.
Kaisha Esty is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies, History, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. She is a historian of slavery and its aftermath, sexuality, empire, and Black womanhood in the nineteenth-century. Dr. Esty is working on her first book project, titled, Weaponizing Virtue: Black Women and Intimate Resistance in the Age of U.S. Expansion. She is the author of the article, “I Told Him to Let Me Alone, That He Hurt Me”: Black Women and Girls and the Battle Over Labor and Sexual Consent in Union-Occupied Territory,” originally published in Labor: Studies in Working Class History. This article won the Association of Black Women’s Historian’s Letitia Woods Brown Article Prize in 2022. Dr. Esty has forthcoming work appearing in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History and Slavery & Abolition. Her research has been supported by the Sherman Emerging Scholar Series, the Warren and Beatrice Susman Fellowship, the American Historical Association, the African American Intellectual History Society, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Dr. Esty earned her BA and Masters in American Studies at the University of Nottingham in the UK. She holds a Ph.D. in African American and women’s and gender history from Rutgers University.