1The women of all conditions who lived in the Caribbean societies under French and English (later British) rule in the period of slavery, from the first decades of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, have produced few writings. [1] For the British West Indies, women of European descent have left a few autobiographies (Janet Schaw, Maria Skinner Nugent, Eliza Chadwick Roberts) and some correspondence. [2] A small number of letters written by enslaved women or free women of colour have also been preserved. Mary Prince is the only former Caribbean slave to have published an autobiography, which in fact played a crucial role in the abolitionist movement. [3] Nevertheless, the men who campaigned for abolition in Great Britain did engage with the question of women in their writings. These various kinds of primary sources are practically non-existent for the French islands, but women appear in their social and ethnic diversity in the censuses, sacramental records, notarial deeds and, above all, court records, which are richer than for the British Caribbean. For both island groups, one can also find brief individual or collective portraits of women in travel literature and histories of each colony, or, in the press, through advertisements concerning runaway slaves. Provided it is the object of critical reflection, as is the case today, the paucity of sources, while real, is not an insurmountable obstacle. [4] It therefore only partially explains the late rise of French historiography on women and gender in societies with slavery. Within the Anglophone world, the boom in feminist research began earlier, perhaps because a female historian, Elsa Goveia, played a major role in developing a history of slavery which gave a central place to slaves in the years before and after independence in the British islands. [5] Before analysing these historiographies, which have steadily increased in volume since the 1970s and the rise of feminist movements, a more general account of the field of Caribbean studies is called for. We will then go on to examine publications relating to enslaved women, a predominant topic for a long time, and then those concerning free women of colour and white women, as well as masculinities. [6]

Caribbean Studies: a fragmented and heterogenous field

2By comparison with North American and Latin American historiographies, works on the Caribbean are far less developed and integrated. [7] They do not always have their own autonomy, often remaining associated with Latin American Studies. This situation is related to the linguistic, cultural and political fragmentation of the region, which was the crossroads of all the European colonial empires in the early modern period, and to the persistence there of European rule long after the colonies on the mainland gained their independence. Some Caribbean states, such as Haiti, also count amongst the poorest in the world today and lack the means to sustain research. These historiographical partitions are problematic, because the islands of the Antilles share a common history marked by several factors: the virtual disappearance, in a brutal and relatively rapid fashion, of the indigenous populations after the arrival of European colonizers, the slave trade with Africa, the system of large sugar plantations, and late decolonization. [8]

3Within the Caribbean, it is particularly interesting to compare the historiographies of the Anglophone and Francophone worlds, because both the English and the French began to settle in the region at the same time, as they did in North America, at the beginning of the seventeenth century; French-English rivalry had a considerable impact on Caribbean and Atlantic dynamics. Moreover, some islands were shared by the French and the English, while others changed hands several times between the two powers. The French and the British Antilles also experienced similar later developments. It was in these islands that the plantation system and African slavery intersected more rapidly, and that racial slavery took on its most brutal forms in connection with the sugar-based economy. Saint-Domingue and Jamaica were responsible for the prosperity of the British and French Atlantic empires in the eighteenth century. Slavery was definitively abolished in the two powers’ colonies at roughly the same time, in 1833-1838 for Britain and 1848 for France.

4Each group of islands is nevertheless the object of several historiographies, whether produced locally, in the former colonizing countries, or in the United States. These historiographies do not necessarily have the same concerns and motivations, and are not always in dialogue with each other. [9] Evidence of this is the way in which some historians in the French Antilles view with suspicion the growth of Atlantic studies, a development that has led their colleagues in the United States to become increasingly interested in the Caribbean and especially in Saint-Domingue. The Atlantic perspective is sometimes seen as a new imperialism, whereas the priority for researchers based in the area is to develop a local history aimed at the island populations, in the context of an unfinished decolonization. [10] As a result of the North American involvement, there is a historiography both in French and in English on the French islands, whereas French-language work on the territories dependent on the English Crown is almost non-existent.

5Research on the French Antilles is less prolific than that on the British West Indies. The main explanation for this situation is the chronological gap in the establishment of structures of higher education and research, with the British islands having gained their independence at the beginning of the 1960s, while, with the exception of Haiti (formerly Saint-Domingue), those under French sovereignty have remained so. A college of higher education linked to London University was created at Mona in Jamaica as early as 1948, and the University of the West Indies was founded in 1962. In contrast, an outpost of the Bordeaux Faculty of Letters was created in Martinique only in 1963, while the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane came into existence only in 1982. [11] Another factor is linked to the slower rate of integration of the history of colonization and slavery into French national history than was the case in the United Kingdom. [12] There is in fact no research centre specializing in the Antilles within metropolitan France, and until recently this was also the case for associations of Caribbean studies.

6In both sets of historiographies, slavery occupies a privileged position, because it is seen as the primary causal factor in the historical evolution of the Antilles. [13] This slavery-based paradigm also explains the focus on the eighteenth century, the period when the transatlantic slave trade and the Atlantic slave system were at their height, while there are fewer studies on the seventeenth century, the first half of the nineteenth century, or the post-abolition period. For the same reason, researchers tend to focus on Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, which were the biggest producers of sugar in the eighteenth century, rather than on the Lesser Antilles. The greater attention devoted to Saint-Domingue should also be linked to the new importance given to the Haitian Revolution within Atlantic studies. There is nevertheless a certain effort at the moment to better take into account the long timescale of the period of slavery; the diversity of slave systems between the islands; their various economic activities (cattle-breeding, craft work and services, alongside agriculture);other plant crops (tobacco and coffee, not just sugar cane);the different milieus (towns versus plantations); and the variety of social actors involved in the colonization of the region. [14]

7This greater inclusion of multiple historical actors also concerns women. Since the 1970s, interest in the latter has been growing, in particular in Anglophone historiography on the British and French islands. The delay in French-language research in this area is linked both to the smaller number of scholars and to the difficulty in getting recognition for work on women and gender as a legitimate field of study in France. It is very revealing that there are a number of historiographical articles or essays on women and gender in the British Caribbean during the period of slavery, and none on the French islands. [15] Since historians from the former British West Indies, Great Britain, and the United States study territories which belonged to the same empire, since they share a common language, and since their academic worlds are closely connected, research on the British islands is in tune with the North American historiography on slavery which dominates the field of slave studies – a field that focuses on North America, but was relatively quick to develop an interest in women and gender. As a result, not only have publications on this subject increased in number in the historiographies on the British islands, but no study of slavery any longer ignores the question of gender, even when it is not its main subject of investigation.

A long-lasting focus on enslaved women

8Historiographies on women in the English and French Caribbean remain subdivided along the lines of status and racial categorization. The earliest studies dealt with enslaved women. After the pioneering work of Lucille Mathurin Mair, who wrote her PhD thesis under the supervision of Elsa Goveia at the beginning of the 1970s, and was one of the co-founders of the Centre for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies in 1993, [16] Hilary Beckles, Marietta Morrissey, Barbara Bush and Verene Shepherd all published important books on the subject starting in the years 1980-1990. [17] During the same period, Arlette Gautier and Myriam Cottias were isolated in the field of research on the French Antilles. [18] They were joined later by Jennifer Morgan, Diana Paton and Trevor Burnard as regards the West Indies, and by Bernard Moitt for the French islands. [19] In each generation, collective volumes on enslaved or free women of colour in the Western hemisphere also helped open up the historiography of the Americas as a whole. [20] Moreover works on enslaved women were legitimized by research on the transatlantic slave trade. The creation of a database including almost 36,000 slave voyages from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century has shown that while more men than women were forcibly transported across the Atlantic, four out of every five women who migrated to the New World between the end of the fifteenth century and 1820 were African. Enslaved women therefore played a crucial role in the development of new societies throughout the Americas, and particularly in the Caribbean. [21]

9Historians working on the Antilles have been interested in the specificity of the exploitation of enslaved women, distinguishing between what was common to American slave societies as a whole and what was particular to the Caribbean system of large sugar plantations. African slavery in American colonies overturned the sexual division of labour that existed in European and African societies. Although African women were in charge of most agricultural activities in their societies of origin, they had never had to carry out such hard labour as that imposed on them on American plantations, especially the sugar plantations. Since skilled or semi-skilled work there was reserved for men, women often made up a large proportion of the field hands, even sometimes the majority of them. In the sugar islands, the only escape for women from hard labour in the fields or the mill was domestic service, which did not need numerous workers. On the other hand, with the transition from European indentured servants to African slaves as the main workforce on the plantations in the course of the seventeenth century, it became culturally unthinkable to demand such work from white women. The gruelling toil in the cane fields that was forced on enslaved women explains their high mortality, their low level of fertility, and a very high rate of infant mortality. [22] As a result of these deadly conditions, the slave societies of the Caribbean, as of the whole of the Americas (except for North America from the middle of the eighteenth century and Barbados from the end of the eighteenth century), could not reproduce themselves and grow without bringing in new slaves from Africa.

10The second particular feature of the exploitation of enslaved women is that it concerned their reproductive capacity as much as their work. Jennifer Morgan has recently demonstrated that the planters’ interest in women’s functions as “breeders” or “reproducers” dated not from the period following the abolition of the international slave trade in the early nineteenth century, nor even from the second half of the eighteenth, but already existed in the seventeenth. [23] But these concerns became sharper after the American War of Independence (1775-1783). The growing demand for slaves which the slave trade was struggling to meet, the large-scale slave revolts that had shaken the Caribbean during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) and which had made the planters suspicious of Africa-born slaves, and the rise of abolitionism all pushed the public authorities and masters to try to reduce slave mortality and encourage births in the context of attempts to reform slavery. A debate then arose as to the causes of the slaves’ low fertility, with the planters accusing the women of being responsible for it through their so-called sexual debauchery, which supposedly led to an increasing number of sexually transmitted diseases, while the abolitionists pointed to the brutality of their exploitation. These discussions have been taken up by historians, who also disagree on the respective roles of living and working conditions, modes of resistance (abortion and infanticide), and the spacing out of births in relation to practices of breastfeeding carried over from Africa. [24] As a result, new research currently emerging is interested not in the causes but in the consequences of the low fertility of enslaved women, and takes a wider view of the connections between maternity and slavery. These works pay attention to the roles of enslaved women as midwives and wet nurses for their masters’ children, and take into account the points of view of abolitionists, missionaries, doctors, and of slave communities as a whole. [25]

11While British abolitionists very quickly took up this question of reproduction, they were much slower to denounce the punishments inflicted on women. [26] The use of physical violence was nevertheless particularly important in the Caribbean because of the necessity of imposing very harsh working conditions, and because there were numerous absentee planters, especially in the larger islands. Violence was omnipresent on plantations but also existed in the urban environment. The masters or their representatives were as cruel to the women as they were to the men, and used the same form of punishments, contrary to the differences in penalties applied within European societies. [27] The specificity of the process of brutalization enforced on women, however, resided in a systematic use of sexual violence as an instrument of domination. [28]

12Enslaved women did not remain passive in the face of the physical, verbal and symbolic violence inflicted on them. The significance and the particular forms of their resistance constitute another subject of historiographical debate. It is true that throughout the Americas, they were less likely to escape than men and played a less important role in revolts, no doubt because they were in charge of the children. [29] They also had a chance of improving their situation and gaining their freedom through sexual relationships with white men. [30] As a result, resistance and accommodation might seem difficult to distinguish. To counter this image of their being less “resistant”, some historians argue that they were no less rebellious, but that their participation had more to do with small-scale, everyday resistance (running away for a few days or weeks; slowing down the pace of work) with the exception of their refusal to conceive, abortion and infanticide. [31] Other historians have studied the real or mythical role of certain female figures, such as Queen Nanny in the maroon communities and Cubah (Akua) in the Tacky rebellion in Jamaica (1760). [32] Finally, the involvement of enslaved women or those newly freed in the revolutionary conflicts, and the way in which they tried to maintain their freedom during this period of torment are now the focus of new attention. [33]

More recent interest in other women and masculinities

13Beyond the age of Revolutions there were also many women who succeeded in gaining their freedom in different ways, and who came to swell the ranks of the free populations of colour. Across the whole of the Americas, manumission constituted the most common way of gaining freedom; this form of manumisssion by the master concerned in the first place women engaged in sexual and conjugal relationships with their owners, and their children of mixed descent. This phenomenon has given rise to two historiographical debates. The first concerns the prevalence and significance of métissage or racial mixing, and its links with the racialization of slave societies. In Francophone historiography, historians are not primarily concerned with the modalities of interracial unions, which could take many different forms, from rape to marriage, and had a different meaning depending on their legal or illegal, legitimate or illegitimate, public or secret character. They often focus on the relationships that can be considered consensual, and minimize the importance of sexual violence. Mixed unions were not prohibited in the Caribbean (except in Antigua where the law was probably not enforced) as opposed to the situation in British mainland colonies and in French Louisiana. In the French Antilles, interracial marriages nevertheless tended to disappear everywhere, except in the southern province of Saint-Domingue where they persisted until the revolutionary period. [34] Yet in both the French and the British Caribbean, white men of all social ranks did not hesitate to show off their concubines of colour, whether enslaved or free. These concubines of colour compensated for the small number of white women, which varied from island to island (they were far less numerous in Jamaica than in Barbados). In Jamaica, white men belonging to the colonial elites also supported the petitions which a number of their concubines and mixed-descent children presented to the colonial assembly, with the aim of obtaining the rights and privileges that went along with being naturalized as British. [35] As long as this métissage remained linked to illegitimacy, it did not threaten white domination, as a result of the huge numerical disparity between blacks and whites (enslaved people made up 80% to 90% of the island populations in the second half of the eighteenth century). Rather than being the sign of an indifference towards race, open mixed unions can be seen as contributing to the racialization of slave societies. [36] A discourse of hypersexualization of women of colour also developed, stressing their seductive powers. [37] These writings, which simultaneously celebrated the beauty of the women and revealed great anxiety towards them, contrasted with the travel accounts that described the bodies of African women as monstrous in order to justify the enslavement of all Africans. [38]

14The second debate concerns the different ways in which women were freed and the multiple factors behind the growth of large numbers of free people of colour in both French and British islands in the course of the eighteenth century. Historians working on the French Antilles have sought to show that sexual and conjugal relationships with masters or overseers were not the only, or even the main, way of gaining one’s freedom, and that many women succeeded in purchasing their freedom, despite the law prohibiting this custom. [39] The practice of buying oneself out was associated with the development of the slave economy. Enslaved women played a crucial role in the marketing, in towns, of plants and small animals produced on the individual lots that they were often granted on plantations. [40] Since the towns were mainly the site of domestic slavery, which chiefly affected women, while also offering economic conditions that allowed slaves to work partly on their own account and to put some money aside, this was where the number of manumissions was also the highest, and concerned women above all. On the other hand, enslaved women could not obtain their freedom through militia service as the men could. The demographic weight of free people of colour appears therefore not to be linked to the frequency of manumissions by masters, but to the unceasing efforts of slaves to free themselves. Natural increase would also have been a determining factor. [41]

15Beyond this issue of the multiple routes to freedom, more studies of the entrepreneurial activities and economic power of free women of colour in the port cities are now being published. [42] Ongoing research based on primary sources resulting from the financial indemnity granted to slave owners at the time of abolition also reveals that women made up a significant part of this social category in the towns. [43] The confrontation between the agency of free women of colour and the subordination of enslaved women can be illustrated by the famous case of Rachel Pringle Polgreen, who ran a brothel in Bridgetown, Barbados, in which she prostituted enslaved women for the benefit of white officers passing through. [44] The relationships, including those of gender, between all free people of colour and former slaves were however transformed by the general emancipation. [45]

16White women shared with free women of colour a way of life that was often urban. The history of women has indeed benefited from the new attention directed to port cities within Atlantic studies. [46] Largely ignored in research on the French Antilles, [47] these white women are currently the object of lively interest concerning the British West Indies. [48] The question of white women illuminates the tensions between the patriarchal order, the slave system and white supremacy. Research topics on white women include their access to property, [49] their participation in the management of plantations and their involvement in commerce, [50] their relations with their domestic and other slaves (they very often owned women), [51] their sexuality (and in particular their relationships with black men), [52] their role in the construction of white identity, and their image in (travel) literature. [53] Alongside these female elites on whom research has mostly concentrated, women belonging to the lower classes are not completely overlooked. [54]

17A new phase in the historiography on women and gender in the British Caribbean has been emerging in recent years, with the publication of works seeking to overcome the historiographic barriers between enslaved women, free women of colour and white women. [55] Lucille Mathurin Mair had been one of the few historians to take into consideration all three groups in her PhD thesis of 1974, but her approach was not emulated by others. Today, however, all historians challenge the famous affirmation by this pioneer of feminist studies that “the black woman produced, the brown woman served, and the white woman consumed”, and are thinking anew the relations between status, class, race, and gender. [56] They show that different systems of domination coexisted, either reinforcing or contradicting each other. Another sign of the maturity of the field is the appearance of research on masculinities, which underwent major transformations within slave societies. White men benefited from a phenomenon of hyper-masculinization that depended on their relations with slaves, both female (through unlimited access to enslaved women and a sexuality disconnected from marriage), and male (through a process of animalization and devirilization of enslaved men). At the same time, male masters and slaves came together in the defence of a patriarchal order, with the result that enslaved women were subjected to a double male domination. [57]

18Consequently, Trevor Burnard defends the idea that“gender was nearly as important as race in defining social relationships in early Jamaica”. [58] This claim is certainly true for the whole of the British and French Caribbean. But while it is becoming possible to prove it for the former, this is not yet the case for the latter. At the end of this comparison between the two historiographies, we can therefore only call for more research on women and gender in the French Antilles. It is time to catch up!