Black Women's Identity: Stereotypes, Respectability and Passionlessness (1890-1930)

Black Women's Identity: Stereotypes, Respectability and Passionlessness (1890-1930)

Being part of two marginalized groups historically deemed inferior, Black females figured in a distinctive way different from either Black men or White women. They were ascribed peculiar derogatory images that were the legacy of a long-lived racism and sexism. Myths1 perpetuated by Whites and long underpinning the image of Blacks might contain common elements for Black females and males as their experiences were two sides of the same coin and influenced each other. However, standing on the nexus of American race and sex ideologies, Black women were doubly discredited. Racial and discriminatory representations of Black womanhood which had roots in the antebellum era evolved according to Patricia Morton around four central figures: the "inept domestic servant" (the mammy), the domineering matriarch, the sex object (the Jezebel), and the tragic mulatto.2 Drawing on some works by Black female writers and Blacks' racial uplift strategy between the 1890s and the 1930s, this article delineates the distorted conceptualization of Black women, and the way it molded their identities. It will primarily map out three of these images namely the mammy, the Jezebel, and the tragic mulatto.3

• 4 P. Morton, op. cit., 36.

2The bipolar conceptualization of Black and White womanhood assigned Black women all the negative traits of disgrace whereas White women were attributed all the idealized aspects of "true womanhood", such as piety, deference, domesticity, passionlessness, chastity, cleanness and fragility. Conversely, Black women were conceived and pictured as primitive, lustful, seductive, physically strong, domineering, unwomanly and dirty. There was a breadth of stereotypical perceptions of Black women, which placed them outside the enclave of delicacy, femininity, respectability and virtue. As Patricia Morton suggests, "all except Mammy had profoundly derogatory, dehumanizing characterization."4

Black women's enslavement and the construction of stereotypes

3In fact, the old slave mammy or "Aunt Jemima" figure pervaded a body of writings about Black womanhood. She was generally dark-skinned, strong-bodied, thick-lipped, obese and ugly. Being the favorite servant, the skilled cook or the most devoted housekeeper she incarnated the perfect mother in the house capable of nurturing White children and at the same time looking after her children and sustaining her family. She was "the all-mother figure"5 and "mother earth", a "superwoman" stronger than her man and less feminine than other women.6 Thanks to her devotion and loyalty to her masters and mistresses as well as her skills, she was more elevated in status than those working in the fields and more likely than her fellows to progress and therefore rise in standing. She was also depicted as asexualized and defeminized because of her old age, her physical strength and her obesity. This placed her "beyond the pale of the carnal, above the taint of Jezebel."7

• 5 W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Damnation of Women", Darkwater:Voices from within the Veil, New York: Harcou (...)

• 6 Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, New York: Norton, 199 (...)

• 7 D. G. White, op. cit., 60.

• 8 This cultural uplift theory that pervaded the Progressive Era in the USA foregrounded women's resp (...)

• 9 P. Morton, op. cit., 10.

• 10 On the idea of the mammy being an epitome of racial harmony during slavery, see Earl E. Thorpe's T (...)

• 11 P. Morton, op. cit., 35.

• 12 Ibid., 103.

4Her conceptualization as an ideal slave and mother, her domesticity, her virtue, and her defeminized image were in tune with the Victorian ideals of womanhood and thus fashioned her idealized image. She was a good example for the "cultural uplift" theory.8 Furthermore, the mammy's masculinization highlighted the ultrafemininity of her mistress. Her work was also substantial to the "Lady ideal," the social prestige of Southern White families, and to the "South's romanticization of slavery as an extended White-Black family."9 As perceived by some Southern Black historians,10 the mammy embodied the romanticized interrelated experience between Blacks and Whites, which in turn provided the "stamp of historical legitimation"11for slavery and segregation. This view, which romanticized