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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery Author(s): Anthony S. Parent, Jr. and Susan Brown Wallace Source: Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 3, No. 3, Special Issue: African American Culture and Sexuality (Jan., 1993), pp. 363-401 Published by: University of Texas Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3704013 . Accessed: 24/09/2013 11:00

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery

ANTHONY S. PARENT, JR.

Department of History Wake For est University

and

SUSAN BROWN WALLACE

Psychologist

Fairfax County, Virginia, Public School District

Students of history continue to ignore the simple fact that all individu? als are born by mothers; that everybody was once a child; that people and

peoples begin in their nurseries; and that society consists of individuals in the process of developing from children into parents. [Erik Erikson,

1959]1

Although children were present in substantial numbers dur?

ing late antebellum slavery, little scholarly attention has been paid to

them. Even less concern has been directed toward their development.2

Remarking upon slavery studies in 1986, Leslie Howard Owens points out that "children are often so closely connected with the behavior of

adults and parents that the historical record needs considerable matur-

ing." When childhood is discussed, children's lives are often seen as dis?

tinct from that of their parents and separate from the brutalities that

they suffered. When evidence is presented from the slave autobiogra-

phies and slave interviews, one is led to believe that adults conveyed

1Erik H. Erikson, ?CEgo Development and Historical Change: Identity and the Life

Cycle," Psychological Issues 1 (1959): 18. 2Slave children, fourteen years old and younger, were 45.5 percent ofthe slave popula?

tion, according to a sample based on the 1850 census (James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A

History of American Slaveholders [New York, 1982], p. 249). For discussions of children under slavery, see Willie Lee Rose, "Childhood in Bondage," in Slavery and Freedom, ed. William W. Freehling (New York, 1982), pp. 37-48; Paul D. Escott, Slavery Remembered: A Record ofTwentieth-Century Slave Narratives (Chapel Hill, NC, 1979), pp. 30-31, 34; John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, 2d ed. (New York, 1979), pp. 179-91; EugeneD. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), pp. 502-18.

[Journal ofthe History of Sexuality 1993, vol. 3, no. 3] ?1993 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 1043-4070/93/0303-0004$01.00