Creating and upholding a family in the institution of slavery

Franziska Schulze

Jun 2014 · GRIN Verlag

About this ebook

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject History - America, grade: 1,3, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (Amerikanistik), course: Mixed Race in American Culture and Literature, language: English, abstract: In an encyclopedia the term family is defined as “a fundamental social group in society consisting of one or two parents and their children,” and “all the members of a household under one roof.” Many more definitions have evolved over time through social changes in different societies and have been focused on in cultural studies. In times of slavery in the U.S. blacks had to cope with their living conditions and in that still had the urge to create families. This often was made impossible right from the start because “[l]arge owners often refused to allow marriage[. . .].” Rarely, if ever, the family of slaves could be described as nuclear – father, mother and child. The cause for the lack of a family was easily found. Eugene Genovese explains: “[M]any masters did not respect their slaves’ family feelings and did not hesitate to sell them as individuals.” The physical separation or the fear of such made it difficult to built a loving family. Within the system of slavery, “[. . .] the mother role took on a stronger image,” states Staples. The father figure never withheld great importance within the family structure for various reasons. One of them is that the status of a child always got defined by the status of his or her mother. Children are being influenced during every day of their lives by their parents or the lack thereof. Connected to Alice Randall’s parody “The Wind Done Gone” my analysis will focus on what factors constituted issues in constructing a family for house slaves. I want to point out the difficulties especially women experienced when trying to build a family, and how they influenced the mother-daughter relationship. What mark did they leave on the daughter’s future and how did she cope with the problems of creating a family of her own? Particularly for mulattoes, I am interested in if and how the race itself caused issues that needed to be overcome.