Scholars who write about mass sexual exploitation of black women during slavery rarely discuss its political and social impact on the status of black women. In her important feminist analysis of rape, Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller neglects this issue in the section on slavery. She comments:

Rape in slavery was more than a chance tool of violence. It was an institutionalized crime, part and parcel of the white man’s subjugation of a people for economic and psycho­ logical gain.