Further along the sensibility thread, slave narratives sometimes depicted white women as sensitive enough to reject the more abominable aspects of slavery, but not sensitive enough to reject the he idea that slaves were more than “brute creatures” (Carby 28). A white woman's place within the sphere of the cult of true womanhood would cause her to "assert the superiority of white sensibility," especially given the widely held belief that black slaves could not feel (Carby 28). In contrast, as in Frederick Douglas's description of his white mistress, the influence of the harshness of slavery could still cause “a physical and spiritual decay” of the white woman (Carby 28). White female slave owners could have worked harder to help end slavery, but as demonstrated by the diary of white plantation woman Mary Chestnut, many women thought slaves were unlovable, but could have gotten by if they had not been treated harshly and kept at a distance from the whites. At this point in the essay, Carby returns to her discussion of the limitations of analyzes that attempt to “confront a stereotype with a reality,” within the literary/social ideology of the cult of true femininity. He cites the work of Ann Scott as an example that examines the “contradictory nature of the image of femininity in its relationship to the system of slavery,” but does not delve into why the ideology persisted if it was so unrealistic (Carby 29). . Scott and others argued that the ideology of true womanhood was repeatedly brought into the public eye because it prevented the white woman from acquiring more power than she already had, and perhaps from upsetting the flow of the Southern white family, but this statement is never contextualization in……middle of the paper……sexual abuse of white men (Carby 39). Unlike lynchings, which involved an element of violent spectacle, the rapes of black slaves were never treated with the sense of gravity and horror elicited by the rape of white women. This is a direct consequence of the ideology of true femininity, which associated black slave women with overt sexuality, and the influence of this ideology has continued to influence society's perception of black women to this day. While the cult of true femininity did not remain intact, black women continued to be excluded from “dominant moral codes” (Carby 39). Carby says that in the next essay in her book, she will investigate the years following the antebellum South and emancipation, in which black women writers continued to create a discourse about their own femininity while fighting oppression and sexual abuse..