Sarah “Saartjie” Baartman was born sometime before 1790 and died December 29, 1815. Sarah was exhibited as a freak show in 19th- century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus. Hottentot was a name for the Khoi people but is now considered derogatory. Sarah was born in 1789 in Gamtoos Valley South Africa (Washington).
Baartman grew up on a colonial farm. There is no historical documentation of her indigenous colonial name. Her Dutch name, Saartjie, was given to her by Dutch colonialists. According to Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, her name is the Cape Dutch form of Sarah making her a colonialist servant. Her name plainly means ‘bearded man’ in Dutch or it can mean uncivilized, brutal, and savage. In her early 20s, she was sold to by Alexander…show more content… She had a large buttocks and was alleged to have elongated labia that other Khoisan women were believed to have. To quote historian of science Stephen Jay Gloud,
The labia minora, or inner lips, of the ordinary female genitalia are greatly enlarged in Khoi-San women, and may have hung down three or four inches below the vulva when women stand, thus giving the impression of a separate and enveloping curtain of skin (P. 24, Gloud).
Baartman never allowed this peculiarity to be exposed while she was alive. While in London, a description of her clothing detailed that she did wear some sort of tight-fitting costume over her vagina (Gloud, Washington).
Since her rise to prominence, Baartman’s body set the line between the “normal” Caucasian woman and the “abnormal” African woman. Her buttocks and labia gave the London society views of African women as wild or savage. Her “abnormalities”, as George Cuvier mentions in the “Gender, Race, and Nation” chapter of The Gender Science Reader, made her resemble anything but a white woman. She had a peculiar jaw line, a short chin, and a flat nose, which made her resemble a “negro”. She was often likened to an orangutan as well. (Cuvier, Bartsch,
