Slavery, the Thief of Virtue: the Social Visibility and Alienation of Enslaved Black Women in Abolitionist Discourse

But before virtuous womanhood was significantly challenged as anachronistic, it played a critical role in abolitionist rhetoric. In the mid-nineteenth century, white Christian abolitionists would argue that to sanction slavery was to sanction rampant adultery by white male enslavers who were systematically engaging in extramarital sex with their enslaved Black women and thereby depriving them of their virtue.