An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America's Domestic Slave Trade

by Alexandra J. Finley

Alexandra J. Finley adds crucial new dimensions to the boisterous debate over the relationship between slavery and capitalism by placing women's labor at the center of the antebellum slave trade, focusing particularly on slave traders' ability to profit from enslaved women's domestic, reproductive, and sexual labor. The slave market infiltrated every aspect of southern society, including the most personal spaces of the household, the body, and the self. Finley shows how women's work was necessary to the functioning of the slave trade, and thus to the spread of slavery to the Lower South, the expansion of cotton production, and the profits accompanying both of these markets.

Through the personal histories of four enslaved women, Finley explores the intangible costs of the slave market, moving beyond ledgers, bills of sales, and statements of profit and loss to consider the often incalculable but nevertheless invaluable place of women's emotional, sexual, and domestic labor in the economy. The details of these women's lives reveal the complex intersections of economy, race, and family at the heart of antebellum society.

Genres: History, Gender, American, Nonfiction, American History, Sexuality, Economics

200 pages, Hardcover

First published August 31, 2020

Reviews

[Teri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finley takes a bold look at the way enslaved women were used as commodities in the American slave trade. The author follows the lives of four enslaved women in New Orleans that were utilized by slave traders to help perpetuate the trade and contribute to the economic structure of the trade. Each woman portrayed had specific jobs and identities.

There were the Fancy Girls, who were often able to pass as white women, who helped manage the business and home of slave traders. Corrina Omohundro not only helped manage Silas Omohundro's trading business, but she also managed the slave jail and helped prepare slaves for sale. She was the mother to Silas' children and passed as his wife in later years.

Enslaved women were also utilized as seamstresses. Hector Davis hired out women like Virginia Isham to make clothing for enslaved men and women that he traded. The better dressed the enslaved people up for sale were the better the price he might bring. The business of concubinage was another important aspect of the slave trade economy.

Enslaved women like Sarah Conner became concubines and contributed their sexual labor to boardinghouses and brothels. Conner ran a boarding house for Theophilus Freeman with the specific stipulation that she was buying her freedom. Things didn't quite turn out the way Connor had expected.

Lucy Cheatham was utilized as a housekeeper. Her job as a domestic laborer was to run the household of her enslaver, including handling the chores of the house like cooking and cleaning. Like each of the other three women portrayed, Cheatham was also used as sexual labor. These women were the mothers of many children fathered by their enslavers. In some cases, the records allude to a special bond between the enslaver and enslaved. Finley, though, cautions the reader to look past these bonds to remember that these women were indeed enslaved, sexually abused, and without agency. Several, if not all of these women likely knew each other. The network of slave traders in New Orleans was tight and the men worked with each other to help perpetuate the trade and boost the economy.

Finley utilized court records and the record books of the slave traders to piece together the histories of these four women and the identities they were forced to accept as enslaved women. To slave owners, these women were commodities. They were bargaining chips that helped to make the men successful and contribute to a slave economy.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

CW: sexual violence and assault, racial violence (it's about enslaved women)

An Intimate Economy is a series of four microhistories of enslaved women in the South, told through ledgers and accounting records of their enslavers, as well as court records of a system who denied them autonomy from white men even once freed. Finley explores the various ways these records hide the history of sexual violence that enslaved women, particularly those enslaved as "fancy" women, seamstresses, and housekeepers, experienced from their enslavers and other white men around them, as well as the ways the women resisted.

This book excels at asking questions about what these women experienced, instead of making up a story for them, which would be another form of epistemic violence in addition to that they received during their lifetimes. There were a few questions that the author did not ask, which disappointed me. Throughout, Finley assumes heterosexuality for all the historical figures they discuss. What if not everyone was straight? Maybe some of the long-term relationships between formerly enslaved women were romantic? What if sometimes gay white men employed housekeepers as "beards," because community members always presumed the presence of a sexual relationship between white men and the women they enslaved or employed. Those microhistories would be very difficult to discover, but the chance of them existing is just as likely as any of the women Finely discusses actually loving their "husbands"/enslavers whom they spent their lives with.

Overall, this book is absolutely worth reading for the depth of information about material (not in the Marxist sense) circumstances of slavery. It made me think about not just enslaved persons on plantations, but in cities and in slave jails, and the people who fed and clothed them while there. The system that supported slavery was not just plantation owners, as school curricula might suggest, but everyone living in the southern United States.

[Gwen Hierman]

This was another book I had to read for a class. This was an incredibly difficult read mainly because of the content matter. The lives of enslaved women are largely overlooked because of lack of records. This book does a good job trying to include them in the narrative of the Antebellum period in the U.S.