Turning Wounds into Wisdom and Pain into Power: Recognizing Strategy in Enslaved Women’s Resistance to Bodily Exploitation in the Antebellum US South

Abstract

Whereas the scholarship on enslaved women’s resistance to the most intimate forms of bodily exploitation has grown over the years and developed into dif-ferent directions, not enough attention has been paid to the use of strategy by enslaved women. As a result, enslaved women’s resistance to bodily exploita-tions has wrongly been interpreted as impulsive. To correct this myth, this study broadly explores enslaved women’s strategic gendered resistance by looking at a variety of different sources. It looks at how enslaved women were strategic in resisting sexual abuse, it recognizes enslaved women’s adopted strategies in the practice of wet-nursing, and it explores how enslaved women thought stra-tegically about using methods of resistance such as abortion and infanticide. In an effort to combine these different sources and bring separate directions into which enslaved women’s resistance developed together, this study aims to elucidate that, without denying their victimhood, enslaved women were intel-lectually decisive and calculated in their acts and methods of resistance used when resisting the most intimate forms of bodily exploitation.