Olaudah Equiano Gender Roles

It is very clear that slavery was very prevalent in late 1700’s, yet that did not mean each slave was treated equally. Whether it be the grace of the slave master, or the jobs they were ordered to do, some slaves were worked to death while others lived not as harsh lives. While there are many factors which could influence the lives of these slaves, an important one to look into is if gender had any role in this. Up until today we see gender have a large role in jobs, how hard someone is worked, and treatment towards each other. I will be comparing the slave lives of Mary Prince and Olaudah Equiano, both of the same time period of the late 1780’s. The story of Mary Prince describes Prince's life while she was a slave, under multiple different
Mary prince describes times where she had to wash her master in the bath, “He had an ugly fashion of stripping himself quite naked, and ordering me then to wash him in a tub of water.”(Salih, 24). While this excerpt from the the story of mary prince does not describe any sort of sexual things going on, it is very implied. She goes on to talk about how shameful she is when she hears she must wash her master, implying that something more than washing was going on. There are an exponential amount of rapes with male slave owners and female slaves, and a very scarce amount of cases of male masters and male slave rapes. Along with rape being very gender bias, gender has a big role on what jobs slaves have. While women were able to work out in the fields and in salt ponds doing the very hard manual labor where men were dominant, men were not able to do work in the house like women could. Women were dominant in working in slave masters homes, this is because many slave masters believed if a male slave were to be left alone in the home with the women, they would rape them. Women were also believed to be more nurturing than men, and they were able to wet nurse where men were also not able