Brenda Stevenson - The Enslaved Family: Reflections on Resistance

As part of Black History Month, Professor Brenda E Stevenson, Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women’s History, will give the lecture - The Enslaved Family: Reflections on Resistance

Family was essential to a bondperson’s life and resistance was crucial to their familial endeavors. Family not only meant love, support, procreation, socialization, protection, and reverence. Its humanizing impulse also meant resistance. Resistance—to dehumanization, ill treatment, emasculation and defeminization, infantilization, suppression of one’s culture, destruction of one’s family, and the undermining of family roles—was a fundamental ethos located not only within the individual, but also within enslaved families and communities.