Placing the enslaved woman in labor world

Abstract

This article intends to debate the particularities that gender gave to slavery, focusing on women experience. By a dialogue with the latest critics about the gap of gender perspectives in the Social and Labor History studies, we are willing to look at these women as workers that had their experience marked by gender, race and juridical condition. We prioritized the debate about two ways of exploitation related to female slavery: the reproductive and productive labour. The last one is about the production of wealth for masters by the exploitation of the workforce; yet the reproductive is related to the preservation of slavery system, by the partus sequitur ventrem. Enslaved women lived specific gender forms of violence and oppression, although, they didn’t stop fighting against the exploitation of their bodies, children and family.