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fewer dominant groups or those who are marginalised. 27 Whilst this article does not use slaveholders’ diaries and memoirs as they can be fragmented, they are still very useful when considering how they operated the plantation space as a dominant group to control enslaved women. Some of these diaries and memoirs speak of practices not just in the household, but into the field, enslaved people’ s cabins, quarters, and even neighbouring plantations. Slaveholders’ diaries and memoirs were used to operate the family business on the plantation, as well as to reflect on everyday life and glorify the legacy of the Old South to their descendants. Diaries and memoirs are extremely useful as they are about the everyday private matters that were written within the domestic and economic space of the plantation. Moreover, diaries and memoirs are one of the only ways to capture women’ s voices during the period 1830-60, especially those white women who were active slaveowners. However, when slaveholders recollect their everyday activities and encounters with the enslaved on the plantation, they do not write all the everyday events that occurred such as the power, discipline, and control over enslaved women’ s bodies. Several factors that need to be considered when examining self-censorship in these diaries and memoirs: they were directed towards abolitionists to discredit their cause, they fall short of their gendered ideals in Southern society and some slaveholders wanted to glorify and reminisce on the Old South. Nevertheless, they should not be neglected as they provide historians intimate perspectives when understanding slavery, power and resistance.
However, to fill in these gaps, this research paper will use enslaved people’ s narratives to understand how slaveholders used the space in the plantation to exploit enslaved women’ s bodies. Fugitive enslaved people’ s narratives were written for an abolitionist readership to advance the abolitionist cause leading up to the Civil War. Therefore, these narratives are politically charged. Still, these are extremely useful when providing more of a descriptive narrative to the everyday exploitation of enslaved women. There will be an examination of the WPA interviews pursued under
27
Michel Foucault, Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison( Penguin Classics, 2020), 173.