I'm reading Bernard Bailyn's The Barbarous Years, and most requests for slaves read as if they are specifically for black men ('able-bodied', 'strong', 'workers'). When slavery starts being made into racial laws around the 1670's, there are specific rules set out for white women married to black slaves, making them property as well.
This made me wonder if black women were also with the first black slaves, or if something changed in the second half of the seventeenth century.
I'm really enjoying the book, but so far it kinda ignores women, and I was hoping this sub could give me some more information.
Enslaved women were imported from very early on. As Bailyn notes, enslavers preferred to get men. However, the West Indies had a much larger demand and more expected profit and present wealth. Slavers didn't have to think too hard about whether to stake their best human cargoes on the Caribbean or to try them in the poorer, less populated, more tenuous colonies on the North American mainland. That meant that the mainland got the slaves that the West Indies didn't want or passed over.
West Indian enslavers wanted able-bodied men as much as mainlanders did, which skewed the pool of enslaved labor available to the mainland toward enslaved women, the disabled, older slaves, and those who presented some kind of management problem. An enslaver might sell a frequent runaway or an especially rebellious slave north to get rid of them and recoup some of the initial investment. It's not until some time after slavery is settled down in mainland North America that direct voyages from Africa become the main way slaves arrive.