Sex and Class in Women's History by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Gender Studies, Women's Studies, Reference & Language, Reference, History
ISBN: 9781136239748
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-01-03T05:00:00+00:00

4 Free Black Women and the Question of Matriarchy

SUZANNE LEBSOCK

In 1853, Eliza Gallie, a middle-aged, free black woman of Petersburg, Virgina, was arrested and charged with stealing cabbages from the patch of Alexander Stevens, a white man. She was tried in Mayor's Court and sentenced to thirty-nine lashes. There was nothing unusual in this; free black women were frequently accused of petty crimes, and for free blacks, as for slaves, whipping was the punishment prescribed by law. What made the case a minor spectacle was that Eliza Gallie had resources, and she fought back. She filed an appeal immediately, and two weeks later she hired three of Petersburg's most eminent attorneys and one from Richmond as well. "If the Commonwealth, God bless her, has not met her match in Miss Liza," a local newspaper commented, "it won't be for lack of lawyers." The case came up in Hustings Court in March 1854. Gallie's lawyers argued first of all that her ancestors were of white and Indian blood and that she should therefore be tried as a white person. The court was unconvinced. On the trial's second day, her counsel argued that she was innocent of the theft. The court was again unconvinced. Gallie was pronounced guilty and sentenced to "twenty lashes on her bare back at the public whipping post. . ." At first she set another appeal in motion, but deciding that the case was hopeless, Eliza Gallie dismissed her lawyers and took her punishment.1

Gallie's case was in many ways an unusual one, and yet her story cuts straight to the central contradiction in our common image of the historic black woman. Eliza Gallie was, relatively speaking, a powerful woman, propertied, autonomous (divorced, actually), and assertive. But she was helpless in the end, the victim of the kind of deliberate humiliation that for most of us is past imagining. So it is with our perception of the history of black women as a group. On the one hand, we have been told that black women, in slavery and afterward, were formidable people, "matriarchs" in fact. On the other hand, we know that all along, black women were dreadfully exploited. Rarely has so much power been attributed to so vulnerable a group.

The contradiction can be ironed out, with sufficient attention to definition and evidence. All the evidence used here comes from Petersburg, Virginia, and it comes mainly from the Petersburg of Eliza Gallie's youth, when the first generation out of slavery, the women emancipated in the wake of the American Revolution, established a pattern of female responsibility radically different from that prevailing among whites. Petersburg had fewer than seven thousand residents in 1820, but for its time and region, it was a city of some consequence. Flour milling, tobacco manufacture, and the commerce generated by the farmers of Southside Virginia sustained Petersburg's growth, while the horse races and the theater gave it touches of urban glitter. Only two cities in Virginia had larger populations, and no other Virginia town had a higher proportion of free blacks among its people.

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