ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

The slave family was nothing but a means of control on the part of plantation owners in antebellum America. Concerned solely with the increasing of interests out of slave labor, the white owners provided the slaves only with limited resources--food, clothes, blankets, shoes, and cabins. The less the slave family was supplied with, the owners calculated, the more obedient and hard-working the slaves would be. Yet the slaves had a different view of their family life. It was more than survival from the hardships of slavery. It was rather a means of resistance to the ideological base of slavery. By acquiring more food for their own family, by making ‘qulits’ for their children, and by buying something to make their cabins more comfortable, the slaves proved that they were human beings, not just chattel property. The slave home was also a social space where the slaves shared both criticism on slavery and values that contradicted what the owners believed.

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