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slaveholders used the space on the plantation to exploit and use enslaved women’ s bodies as a site of profit.
The intention of this research study is not to portray enslaved women solely as victims, but rather recast slaveholders’ harsh conditions and violent means as strategic upon the plantation. This research study intends to highlight the harsh conditions in which enslaved persons lived and how slaveholders played a significant role in this. This study supports works such as Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Thavolia Glymph and Emily West who reveal how slaveholders systematically use the plantation to exploit enslaved women’ s bodies in a variety of ways. 25 This study sits alongside literature such as Emily West and Stephanie Camp who investigate enslaved women’ s resistance; their resistance can only be understood in its full complexity and multifaceted nature, when there is a full understanding about the gendered constraints and systematic violence used to shape enslaved women’ s lived experiences. 26 Therefore, this study intends to highlight how slaveholders systematically organised the plantation to exploit enslaved women.
Methodology
This article will use spatial history to demonstrate how slaveholders maintained the institution of slavery on the plantation. Michel Foucault has argued in his theory of space, that dominant groups establish rules and procedures in space to discipline
25
Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household( Cambridge University Press, 2008), Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South( Yale University Press, 2019), Emily West, " Reflections on the History and Historians of the black woman’ s role in the community of slaves: enslaved women and intimate partner sexual violence," American Nineteenth Century History 19, no. 1( 2018): 1-21. https:// doi. org / 10.1080 / 14664658.2018.1429333 and Emily West, " Masters and marriages, profits and paternalism: Slave owners’ perspectives on cross‐plantation unions in antebellum South Carolina," Slavery and Abolition 21, no. 1( 2000): 56-72. https:// doi. org / 10.1080 / 01440390008575295
26
Stephanie Camp, Closer to freedom: enslaved women and everyday resistance in the plantation South( University of North Carolina Press, 2004) Stephanie Camp,“‘ I Could Not Stay There’: Enslaved Women, Truancy and the Geography of Everyday Forms of Resistance in the Antebellum Plantation South,” Slavery and Abolition 23, no. 3( 2002): 1-20. https:// doi. org / 10.1080 / 714005245, Emily West and Erin Shearer,“ Fertility control, shared nurturing, and dual exploitation: the lives of enslaved mothers in the antebellum United States." In Motherhood, Childlessness and the Care of Children in Atlantic Slave Societies, ed. By Camillia Cowling, Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado, Diana Paton and Emily West.( Routledge, 2020), 117-131