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Difficulty: MediumGendered Dimensions of Slavery and Resistance

Read the following excerpt from William Craft's memoir, *Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom* (1860), describing his wife Ellen’s plan to escape from Georgia:

'Knowing that slaveholders had the right to register and examine any lone female traveler, my wife, who was very fair, suggested that she should disguise herself as a young cotton planter, and that I should travel with her as her slave. To prevent her from having to sign her name at hotels, we placed her right arm in a sling; and to limit conversation, she bound up her face in bandages to feign an illness.'

Which of the following best analyzes how Ellen Craft's disguise exploited the gendered and racial norms of the antebellum South to facilitate their escape?

  1. It leveraged the social deference and privacy granted to wealthy, injured white men, enabling her to bypass literacy requirements and travel restrictions that typically hindered enslaved women.Answer
  2. B
    It was designed to establish a permanent grand maroon society in the Southern wilderness, demonstrating how enslaved women led community-wide flights.
  3. C
    It relied on the legal protections of *partus sequitur ventrem* to ensure that any children they had during their journey would inherit the legal status of free white citizens.
  4. D
    It shows that enslaved women's resistance was confined to spontaneous, overt armed rebellions that directly challenged plantation authorities.

Answer

The correct choice is the option explaining that the disguise leveraged the social deference and privacy granted to wealthy, injured white men, allowing her to bypass literacy requirements and travel restrictions.
The correct option is correct because Ellen Craft's disguise as an injured, wealthy white male planter allowed her to exploit the gender and class privileges associated with that identity. The bandages and sling served as practical strategies to avoid conversation and writing (since she was illiterate), while her presentation as a white man bypassed the heightened surveillance that lone traveling women or enslaved individuals faced in the antebellum South.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the stimulus excerpt to identify Ellen Craft's specific disguise tactics and the social constraints she faced.
She disguised herself as an injured, wealthy white male cotton planter traveling with an enslaved companion.
Enslaved women faced severe restrictions when traveling alone and were subject to scrutiny and requirements for written passes.
2
Evaluate how the disguise manipulated southern racial and gender expectations.
The bandages and sling prevented her from having to speak or sign hotel registries (which would reveal her illiteracy), and traveling as a wealthy white man afforded her deference and relative privacy.
This circumvented the legal and social obstacles faced by traveling women and enslaved persons.
3
Differentiate the correct interpretation from the historical misconceptions presented in the distractors.
The correct choice explains how the disguise exploited white male privilege, while the distractors confuse this covert escape with maroonage, misunderstand the reproductive legal doctrine of *partus sequitur ventrem*, or incorrectly assert that women's resistance was limited to overt armed rebellions.
To verify the historical accuracy of the analysis.

Key Concept

Gendered Dimensions of Slavery and Resistance

Hints

1
Identify the social status that Ellen Craft assumed and the reasons behind her choice of disguise.
2
Consider how traveling as a wealthy, injured white man would allow her to bypass common checks, such as proving literacy or traveling without a male protector.

Practice More

Review other primary sources of gendered resistance, such as Harriet Jacobs's *Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl*, to contrast different covert strategies used by enslaved women.
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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Topics

Gendered Dimensions of Slavery and Resistance

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