ABSTRACT
In this chapter I argue that it is in the era of slavery that the seeds were planted for the emergence of African American women’s tradition of leadership. Hine and Thompson (1998) made the important point that African women who arrived in the New World during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were likely “accustomed to being resourceful, determined, and somewhat independent economically” (p. 11), even in the context of the diverse expressions of patriarchal African cultures from which they were stolen or sold. Therefore, one could argue, as Hine and Thompson did, that the enslaved African woman had the remnants of a cultural advantage that would help her survive in the New World. However, I argue that it is the expression and re-creation of that cultural advantage in the context of U.S. institutionalized slavery-a system that was unique in its brutality, even in a world that regularly sanctioned exploitative labor-that a tradition of African American women’s leadership emerged.
