Bookmark
Exploring Enslaved Women’s History through Literature BY JANE LAMM CARROLL, PhD
S
ince childhood, I have been both an avid reader and deeply fascinated by the past, so literature and history have always been inexorably intertwined in my life. Literature has acted as a window into history and as a source of historical knowledge, providing an avenue into past events, while also spurring and answering my historical questions. As a professor of history, I incorporate literature into almost all of my courses — especially those focusing on women’s and feminist history — but also in U.S. history courses examining the experiences of historically marginalized people due to their race, class, gender, religion, or nationality. The literature I employ includes novels written in the past, historical fiction, autobiographies, biographies, and plays. As an educator, I have found that literature acts as a very successful empathetic “hook.” These stories effectively draw students into learning about diverse
people’s experiences from previous eras and, importantly, spark their curiosity and questions about the past. While I was still in graduate school in the 1980s, I read Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. It compelled me to dive more deeply into the history of slavery in the United States — especially the experiences of enslaved women — as I strove to understand why a mother would kill her own child rather than allow her to be dragged back into slavery. Once I began reading the narratives of formerly enslaved women, I began to understand. The system of slavery in the United States was a profoundly evil institution, and its morally corrosive, dehumanizing, and violent effects are nowhere more evident than in the stories and experiences of enslaved women. But they are also inspirational accounts of survival, resistance, and resilience in the face of unrelenting oppression.
Jane Lamm Carroll ’80, PhD, is a professor of history and women’s studies at St. Catherine University. She was the Sister Mona Riley Endowed Chair in the Humanities for 2017–2020. She is the author of Daybreak Woman: An Anglo-Dakota Life (November 2020) published with the Minnesota Historical Society Press.
14
ST. CATHERINE UNIVERSITY • SPRING 2021
