On land, enslaved women also resisted their enslavers, such as in a 1708 revolt in Queens, New York, where an enslaved woman and man killed their enslaver and his family, a story Hall recounts in “Wake.” But because a woman led it, the incident hadn’t been historically classified as a revolt against enslavement, and “Historians would have seen ‘woman’ and ‘murdered her master’ and immediately dismissed it as some kind of individual household violence,” Hall writes, noting that such characterizations rely on gender-based stereotypes. But “the women used their relative mobility and access to weapons to plan and initiate revolt after revolt after revolt,” Hall writes. Hall says “the slave ship crews remained oblivious to the agency of the enslaved women,” who they didn’t believe would fight back against their enslavement. On slave ships, enslaved women were kept “mostly unchained, on-deck, and near the weapons,” Hall writes in “Wake.” While this proximity to the crew allowed for sexual abuse, it also created opportunities for women to initiate revolts. Revolts included physical fights - in which enslaved people sometimes killed their enslavers - and other forms of resistance sometimes people jumped off slave ships to drown themselves before the ships reached land. The book tells the previously untold stories of female leaders of slave revolts - which occurred in West African villages before people were kidnapped and enslaved, on slave ships traveling from Africa to the Americas, and on plantations in the Americas, Hall said.
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