HISTORY 74j

WOMEN'S WORK: GENDER IN THE WORLD OF ATLANTIC SLAVERY

Tuesdays, 2-4:00 Robinson Hall 105

Susan E. O’Donovan Email: [email protected] Phone: 496-6342 Office: L-15 Robinson Hall Office Hours: Tuesday 9-11:00 & by appointment

Until the last third of the twentieth century, scholars of American history refused by and large to admit African and African descended people into their historical narratives. Coming of age in the Age of Jim Crow, it was a profession deeply influenced by contemporary ideologies and assumptions. For most Americans, black people had no history worth writing. They were non- citizens, non-actors, a people remanded by law and custom to the far side of bigotry’s veil. So too for most of the century were women: white as well as black. Thus if African Americans in general were a people without a past, black women were doubly discounted, roughly dismissed on account of their presumed disabilities of race and sex.

That began to change in the 1960s as a revolutionary struggle to finish a business begun in the 1860s gave rise to wholly new ways of thinking about women, about men, about black people, and white. Thus as the nation grappled with questions of citizenship – who had it and what it meant – historians began to radically revise the stories they had been telling about the past. First to fall were the white men’s narratives, accounts that credited generally middle-class and occasionally poorer classes of European descended men with all that was good or meaningful in human development. By the early 1970s, the majority of historians were becoming convinced that black men at least had a history worth noting, that to one degree or another, they mattered. Not long after, women too began to appear on the historical stage, pushed into view by feminist scholars who insisted that the “fairer sex” – including those of Africa and African descent – were appropriate topics of inquiry.

How significant black women have been remains, however, an open question. How far did black women’s influence extend? Whose history did they shape, and how? Should we consider them a part of the conventional story – meaningful participants in the making of the modern world – or hold them apart, confining them to a parallel but distinctly separate past? These questions and others continue to animate scholars’ debates about black women in the age of New World slavery. These are also the questions that will animate our own investigation into women’s experiences in bondage, their ideologies, their aspirations, and most of all, their place within the always dynamic system that was Atlantic slavery.

REQUIREMENTS

It should go without saying that this course demands considerable reading. Some of the readings are available for purchase at the Coop. Others are available in digital form through Harvard Library. A few will be posted to the course website. All books, including those from which you will read excerpts, are on course reserve at Lamont. In addition to staying abreast of each week’s reading assignments, you will be responsible for:

1) Submitting a brief (1-2 page) response paper each week; collectively they will be worth 30% of your final grade. 2) Leading the discussion at least once. 3) Producing a 15-18 page historiographic essay (as opposed to a research paper based on archival work). This paper may focus on the literature of a particular era or it may explore a theme as it unfolds and develops through time. Regardless of the direction you choose to go, the paper will require you to read an additional 3-4 monographs or their equivalent in essays and articles. (Graduate students should submit an 18-20 page paper based on an additional 6-8 books.) I will need preliminary bibliographies by Tuesday, 25 November, with the final paper being due on the last day of reading period (Monday, 12 January) and will be worth 30% of your final grade. 4) Last, but not least, you will be expected to make informed contributions to each week’s discussion. Silence, in this course, is not golden and class participation will be worth 40% of your final grade.

TIPS FOR CRITICAL READING AND WRITING

It is not enough in this course to simply read the text on the page. Understanding the always shifting terrain that is the history of slaves requires critical reading and critical thinking. This sounds daunting, but in truth, it is not. Below is a set of eight questions which, when posed of each reading assignment, will guide you to the key features that shape each author’s argument. If asked systematically, these questions will also allow you to put the different authors into conversation with one other and open up new understandings about how the field has developed.

These questions also make great starting points for your weekly response papers, and will make it much easier to put each week’s assignment into dialogue with previous readings.

1) What is the author’s purpose? 2) What key questions does the author raise? 3) What information, data, and evidence does the author present? 4) What is the author’s conceptual framework? (In other words, how does the author conceive of the world working?) 5) What are the author’s key conclusions? 6) What are the author’s primary assumptions? (Assumptions are those ideas or understandings we accept without question.) 7) What is the author’s viewpoint or perspective? 8) What are the implications of the author’s reasoning?

BOOKS AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE

 David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas  Edna G. Bay, Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey  Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635-1848  Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas  Kathleen J. Higgins, ‘Licentious Liberty’ in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabara, Mina Gerais  Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, & Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World  Jon Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World  David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas  Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household

SCHEDULE OF READING AND DEBATE

1: September 16: Introduction

2: September 23: Conceptualizing Women and Gender

 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17 (Winter 1992): 251-74  Doreen Massy, “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Space,” in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Exchange, ed. Jon Byrd, et al. (New York, 1993): 59-64  Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist 17 (Feb. 1990): 41-55  Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91 (Dec. 1986): 1053-1075

3: September 30: The Big (and mostly Boy) Story

 David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas

4: October 7: Being African and Slave

 Robert Harms, “Sustaining the System: Trading Towns along the Middle Zaire,” in Women and Slavery in Africa, 95-110  Edward Alpers, “The Story of Swema: Female Vulnerability in Nineteenth-Century East Africa,” in Women and Slavery in Africa, 185-199  Martin Klein, “Sex, Power, and Family Life in the Harem,” in Women and Slavery, vol. 1: Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic, 63-82

5: October 14: Being African and Free

 Edna G. Bay, Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey  Philip J. Havik, “From Pariahs to Patriots: Women Slavers in Nineteenth-century ‘Portuguese’ Guinea,” in Women and Slavery, vol. 1: Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic, 309-334

6: October 21: Women, Gender, and the Atlantic Trade

 Joseph C. Miller, “Slaving as History of Women,” in Women and Slavery, vol. 2: The Modern Atlantic, 284-312  David Richardson, “Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., vol. 58 (Jan. 2001): 69-92  G. Ugo Nwokeji, “African Conceptions of Gender and the Slave Traffic,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., vol. 58 (Jan., 2001): 47-68  Paul E. Lovejoy, “Internal Markets or an Atlantic-Sahara Divide: How Women Fit into the Slave Trade of West Africa,” in Women and Slavery, vol. 1: Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic, 259-279

7: October 28: Making Sugar

 Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635-1848

8: November 4: Making Rice

 Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas

9: November 11:

 No Class – Holiday

10: November 18: Making Gold

 Kathleen J. Higgins, ‘Licentious Liberty’ in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabara, Mina Gerais

11: November 25: The Politics of Sex, Reproduction, and Desire

 Kenneth Morgan, “Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica, ca. 1776-1834,” in Women and Slavery, vol. 2: The Modern Atlantic, 27-53  Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, & Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World  Stancil Barwick to Col. J. B. Lamar, 15 July 1855 12: December 2: (Re) Locating Power

 Jon Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World  Robert Olwell, “’Loose, Idle, and Disorderly’: Slave Women in the Eighteenth-Century Charleston Marketplace,” in More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington, Ind., 1996), 97-110  Laura F. Edwards, “Enslaved Women and the Law: Paradoxes of Subordination in the Post-Revolutionary Carolinas,” Slavery and Abolition 26 (Aug. 2005): 305-323

13: December 9: Being Free in a Slave Society

 David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas

14: December 16: Atlantic Emancipations

 Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household  Martin Klein and Richard Roberts, “Gender and Emancipation in French West Africa,” in Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World, ed. Pamela Scully and Diana Paton (Durham, N.C., 2005), 162-180  Nancy Hodges et al. to Major General O. O. Howard, 21 May 1866  Contract between Fannie Lippitt and Ben Holmes, 12 Mar. 1867