After the English came and conquered the land in the 1400s, being a woman came with so many burdens and problems, but the hardest part of being a woman, they never experienced freedom. As a woman, you had no sense of personal worth to a man, you had to do what you were told and if you didn't you were severely punished. Being a woman meant being property, and owning property was a way for land-owning white men to make a profit. In addition to making a profit, because they were considered property, they could be treated as the "owner" saw fit. Women were raped and beaten without any freedom to speak. In society, women had no identity and were in fact property themselves. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl written by Harriet A. Jacobs, she states that “women are considered of no value, unless they continually increase the fortune of their owners. They are put on equal terms with women. Because women were seen as property and could not defend themselves, they were easy targets. The Virginia law of 1662 and 1705 were proof of this. According to Foner, the Virginia law of 1662 also made the sexual abuse of enslaved women profitable. If a slave was raped, impregnated, and had the child, the child would also be a slave due to the mother's status. Evidence of rape and reproduction was also seen in Jacobs' article Life of a Slave Girl. She wrote “the eldest soon became a mother; and, when the slaver's wife looked at the child, she wept bitterly. She knew that her husband had violated the purity she had so carefully inculcated.” He also wrote that the same slave had another child with her husband until she was sold to her brother, with whom she had two more children. In the Virginia law of 1705, white land owning slave owners were the ones who raped and impregnated their slaves, so they decided to make a law so they could profit from their mistakes.