Woman in Slavery: A Body Thesis

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The lack of authority over the slave woman's body is exemplified by an 1850 daguerrotype of a young slave woman named Delia, found in the photo history of the era at the Peabody Museum (Sterling and Washington18). Delia was a slave girl in Columbia, South Carolina, and belonged to an owner named B.F. Taylor (18). She was "ordered" to pose partially dressed, nude to her waist (in the picture in Sterling's book), for purposes of "scientific studies (18-19)." The photographer, Louis Agassiz, a Harvard University professor, wanted to "study the anatomical details of the 'African race' to bolster his theory that blacks were a separate species, separately created (19)." As the authors of the book, We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century, Dorothy Sterling and Mary Helen Washington (1997) note that Delia no doubt experienced humiliation during the photo session, but the photograph portrays a young woman unaware of the sexual interest she might arouse (19).

In the post Civil War era, without resources to care for their children, and former slave women still enjoyed little authority over their bodies.

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Many resorted to prostitution, or became concubines, or were coerced into sex with white and black men alike, and continued to be victims of rape (Appleton 38).

Today, as we have seen in the high profile case of the singer/celebrity Rhianna, black women are just beginning to confront the secrets and humiliations of their historical past.

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