Sexual Violence and American Slavery

“A timely, thorough, and moving analysis of the exploitation of Black women in the slaveholding South.”—Civil War Monitor

“Compelling. . . . Eaves is successful in establishing rape culture as a fruitful framework to analyze slavery, a success which both makes this book convincing, and which will provide rich potential for future scholars.”—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

“As weighty as it is, understanding how Southern rape culture and slavery went hand-in-hand through the nineteenth century is vital to comprehending race relations as a whole. . . . [Sexual Violence and American Slavery is] doubtless to become an introductory reference for later studies to come.”—Emerging Civil War

“Women’s historians such as Darlene Clark Hine, Thelma Jennings, and Nell Irvin Painter have described the ways that African American women dealt with sexual abuse and the inevitable psychological scars it left in its wake. But Eaves’s study goes much further [and] anchors the significance of white men’s sexual power to the success of slavery while documenting the widespread psychological, emotional, and physical toll it took on enslaver and enslaved alike.”—Journal of Southern History

“An extensive record of ‘knowing’ that refuses to be silenced or erased from past and contemporary histories of sexual violence in the United States.”—American Historical Review

“Eaves' meticulous research unearths the interconnected institutions that undergirded the South’s rape culture, including raw, religion, economics, and social relations. . . . This is a must-read for scholars of the history of slavery, sexuality, and the South.”—Journal of the Civil War Era

“The insights in Shannon Eaves' new book will shape future discussions of sexual violence and exploitation under slavery, whether focused on the history of enslaved people or histories of white southern communities and families. This is an important book that promises to be the gold standard on this subject going forward.”—Hannah Rosen, author of Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South