Twice Invisible: Black Women's Labor, Bodies, and Resistance

The institution of slavery extracted specific, gendered labor from enslaved women that was distinct from — and in addition to — the forced agricultural labor extracted from everyone. Enslaved women were field workers who met the same quotas as men. They were domestic workers inside enslavers' households, subject to constant surveillance and proximity to white men with absolute power over them. And after 1808, when the international slave trade was closed, they were the primary means of reproducing the enslaved labor force — a function the system depended on.

The law of partus sequitur ventrem — established in Virginia in 1662 — determined that the status of a child followed the status of the mother. This meant that the rape of an enslaved woman by a white man not only went unpunished — it was economically productive for the enslaver. The children born of rape were enslaved property. There was no legal protection for enslaved women against sexual violence. The law explicitly exempted enslaved women from the rape statutes that applied to white women.

Harriet Jacobs, who escaped slavery and published her memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in 1861, described the specific horror of enslaved womanhood: "Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women." She described being pursued by her enslaver from age 15 until she hid for seven years in a crawl space above her grandmother's house, unable to stand, watching her children grow up through a crack in the wood.

J. Marion Sims is called the "father of modern gynecology." His statue stood in Central Park in New York City until 2018. He is credited with developing the speculum and surgical techniques for repairing vesico-vaginal fistulas — a debilitating condition common in women after difficult childbirth. His techniques saved many lives.

He developed them by performing repeated, non-consensual surgeries on enslaved Black women in Alabama in the 1840s — without anesthesia. Sims believed, as many of his contemporaries did, that Black people felt less pain than white people. This was not fringe pseudoscience: it was mainstream medical belief, published in medical journals, that justified subjecting Black patients to procedures that would not have been performed on white patients without pain relief. Sims operated on one woman, Anarcha, at least 30 times.

The racist belief that Black people have higher pain tolerance has never been fully purged from American medicine. A 2016 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that a significant percentage of medical students and residents still endorsed false beliefs about biological racial differences in pain tolerance — and that these beliefs predicted treatment disparities. Black patients in emergency rooms receive pain medication at significantly lower rates than white patients with identical injuries. This is Sims's legacy, not just his technique.

The New Deal labor legislation of the 1930s transformed the economic position of American workers — for those it covered. The Social Security Act (1935), the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), and the National Labor Relations Act (1935) established minimum wages, overtime protections, collective bargaining rights, and retirement security. They excluded domestic workers and agricultural workers from most of their provisions.

Domestic workers were not included in federal minimum wage protections until 1974. They were not included in OSHA workplace safety protections until 2013. The care and domestic labor sector — where Black and immigrant women remain concentrated — is the lowest-paid, least protected sector of the American economy, and it was made so by deliberate policy.

Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old Black woman from Baltimore who was treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951. Without her knowledge or consent, her cancer cells were taken and given to researcher George Gey, who discovered that they could reproduce indefinitely in laboratory conditions — the first human cell line to do so. He named them HeLa cells and distributed them freely to researchers worldwide.

HeLa cells have been used in virtually every major medical advance of the past 70 years: the development of the polio vaccine, cancer research, HIV/AIDS research, COVID-19 vaccine development, and countless others. There are estimated to be more HeLa cells in existence than Henrietta Lacks weighed in life. The commercial value of HeLa-derived research exceeds $100 billion. Henrietta Lacks's family was never told her cells had been taken. They did not learn of her contribution to medicine until 1973. They received nothing.

The non-consensual use of Black patients' bodies for medical research had precedent — the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, ongoing at the time, was withholding treatment from Black men with syphilis to observe the disease's progression. The legal question of consent for the use of Henrietta Lacks's cells was not resolved in her family's favor. A 2023 settlement between the family and a cell line company remains confidential. Johns Hopkins has established programs in her name but the family has received no share of the commercial value her cells generated.

The Civil Rights Movement was organized, sustained, and strategically shaped primarily by Black women. Ella Baker trained a generation of organizers, founded SNCC, and explicitly resisted the movement's tendency toward charismatic male leadership. Fannie Lou Hamer organized voter registration in Mississippi after being evicted from her plantation, beaten in jail, and receiving death threats. Diane Nash co-founded SNCC, organized the Nashville sit-ins, and designed the Birmingham Children's Crusade strategy.

At the 1963 March on Washington — the event most associated with the movement's public face — no women were permitted to speak from the main platform. Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, sat on the stage. She was not given a speaking role. She later described being told women would have their "time" after the main program. Their time never came. The march's program listed women only in a separate "tribute to women" section, not as principals.

Bayard Rustin, who organized the entire logistical operation of the March on Washington in eight weeks, was kept invisible because he was gay. The women who built the movement were kept invisible because they were women. The history that was captured was the history of the men who were visible. Ella Baker's comment on this was characteristically direct: "The movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement."

Black women in the United States die from pregnancy-related causes at 2.6 times the rate of white women. This is not a gap that disappears with income or education. Black women with college degrees have worse maternal outcomes than white women who did not finish high school. A 2016 ProPublica investigation found that college-educated Black women had higher maternal mortality rates than white women with eighth-grade educations.

The causes are documented: implicit bias in clinical settings, where Black women's pain reports are taken less seriously; chronic physiological stress from lifelong exposure to racism (researchers call it "weathering" — Black women's bodies age faster biologically due to sustained stress); and specific failures in post-partum care. Tennis star Serena Williams, one of the most watched and celebrated athletes in the world, had to argue with nurses to receive a CT scan after her C-section — she recognized the symptoms of a pulmonary embolism from a previous episode. They initially dismissed her. She was right. She survived. Many Black women in the same situation do not have her insistence or resources.

The killings of Black men by police — Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd — became the visible cases around which movements organized. Black women are also killed by police, at disproportionate rates, and their cases receive significantly less public attention and less prosecutorial action. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term "intersectionality," launched the #SayHerName campaign in 2015 specifically to address this gap.

Breonna Taylor was killed by Louisville police officers on March 13, 2020 in her own home during a no-knock raid on the wrong address. She was 26 years old, a Black woman, an EMT. Her boyfriend fired one shot at the intruders, believing they were being burglarized. She was shot six times. The officers fired 32 shots into the apartment. No officer was charged for her death. One officer was charged with "wanton endangerment" for shots that passed through a wall into a neighboring apartment — not for the shots that killed Taylor.

Sandra Bland was found dead in a Texas jail cell in 2015, three days after being arrested during a traffic stop for failing to signal a lane change. The official ruling was suicide. Her family and advocates disputed this. The officer who arrested her was indicted for perjury; charges were later dismissed. No one was charged for her death.

A 2017 study by the Insight Center for Community Economic Development found that the median net worth of single Black women was $200. The median for single white women was $15,640. The median for single white men was $28,900. These numbers reflect the compounding of every exclusion documented in this thread: from New Deal labor protections, from the GI Bill, from fair wages in domestic and care work, from fair lending in the housing market, from equitable medical treatment, from the public credit that their organizing work produced.

The wealth gap between Black and white Americans is largest for Black women specifically, because they face both the racial wealth gap and the gender pay gap — and because the care and domestic labor sector, where they are concentrated, was excluded from wealth-building policy by design. The Black woman who cleaned a white family's house for 30 years, under the Fair Labor Standards Act's domestic worker exclusion, received no minimum wage, no overtime, no Social Security credit for that work, and no pension. The family she worked for may have used her labor to build the wealth that allowed them to buy a home that doubled in value.

Every generation of Black women in America has produced extraordinary resistance under conditions that were designed to make resistance impossible. Harriet Tubman made 13 trips back into slave territory after her own escape, freeing over 70 people. Ida B. Wells documented lynchings after receiving death threats and never stopped. Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten, evicted, and shot at — and testified before the Democratic National Convention anyway, while LBJ preempted her testimony with a press conference because he was afraid of what she would say.

The Black Lives Matter movement was co-founded in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi — three Black women — after the acquittal of George Zimmerman for Trayvon Martin's murder. The most recent iteration of the voting rights movement in Georgia was led by Stacey Abrams. The "Squad" in Congress — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib — changed the visible demographics of progressive political organizing.

This is not a redemption narrative. The conditions that produced these extraordinary people are not conditions that should exist. The measure of a society is not the extraordinary individuals who survive its violence — it is whether the violence was necessary to begin with. It was not. It was chosen. And it is still being chosen, in every legislative decision that leaves domestic workers without protections, in every hospital that dismisses Black women's pain, in every movement that uses Black women's organizing and then keeps them off the stage.