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White Women in British Caribbean Plantation Societies (Topical Guide)

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White Women in British Caribbean Plantation Societies (Topical Guide) H-Slavery White Women in British Caribbean Plantation Societies (Topical Guide) Page published by David Prior on Monday, May 30, 2016 White Women in British Caribbean Plantation Societies (Topical Guide) Cecily Jones Institute of Gender and Development Studies, Mona Unit, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Kingston, Jamaica Cecily Jones of the University of the West Indies offers H-Slavery the most recent in a series of topical guides concerning the study of slavery. A preliminary draft circulated to the subscribers of H-Slavery for feedback on May 2, 2016 (available here). We thank Dr. Phillips for his comment. This revised version was published May 30, 2016. Introduction Starting with Lucille Mathurin Mair’s now classic study of Jamaican women’s lives in slavery and emancipation, gender history of the Caribbean has rapidly expanded, birthing a rich body of scholarship critically exploring colonialism as a gendered process (Mair 1974). Mair’s study of women and slavery in Jamaica was the catalyst to the engendering of Caribbean history, mapping as it did the complex reconfigurations of gender identities, relations, and roles of African and European women. Following in Mair’s footsteps, historians Verene Shepherd and Hilary Beckles have revealed the pivotal, multi-layered productive and reproductive roles of enslaved and freed, black and coloured women in Jamaican and Barbadian slave economies (Shepherd 1998; Beckles 1993). While many studies now acknowledge the significance of gender in shaping the experiences of women of African heritage, similar rigor has not been brought to bear on the recovery of white creole women’s experiences (see for instance Shepherd, Bailey and Brereton’sEngendering History: Caribbean women in historical perspective, 1995). Over twenty five years ago Beckles critiqued an evident Afrocentric tendency to relegate white creole women to the conceptual and analytical margins of gender and race histories, a paradigmatic approach that elides the heterogeneity of white women, leaving them undifferentiated by social class, marital status, national origin, age, and religion (Beckles 1993). In doing so, gender historians of slavery leave unexamined a critical dimension of the interplay of race, gendered whiteness, sex and sexuality, and social class in structuring colonial relations of power (see for instance Morrisey 1989; Scully & Paton 1985). This is not to suggest that gender historians have entirely overlooked the specificity of white women’s material experiences. Exploratory studies by Bush (1981), Jones (1998), Sturtz (1999, 2010), Brereton (1995), Burnard (1991), and Zacek (2009) have probed aspects of their material realities, while my own comparative study of white women in Barbados and North Carolina (Jones 2007), represents the sole full-length monograph to privilege white Caribbean women of Anglophone heritage as central analytical actors. Much of Beckles’s argument retains validity today, though we need also note the near-exclusion from Citation: David Prior. White Women in British Caribbean Plantation Societies (Topical Guide). H-Slavery. 05-30-2016. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11465/pages/127503/white-women-british-caribbean-plantation-societies-topical-guide Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Slavery Caribbean gender history of other women of non-African heritage – Indigenous, Chinese, Syrian, Jewish, Portuguese – who resided within the colonial Caribbean. White Women and Slave Historiography In some ways, white creole women remain among the most elusive and invisible of colonial social actors, shadowy figures on the colonial Caribbean landscape. Few left behind biographical or literary traces of their existences, and the limited data sources are largely the products of elite and middle class residents and visitors to the region (Long 1774; Nugent 1907; Carmichael 1834; Schaw 1921; and in scholarship see Brereton 1985; Callaghan 2004). To some extent their general historical invisibility also stems from their demographic scarcity; numerically, white women represented the smallest (non-indigenous) demographic group throughout the region for most of the era of plantation slavery. Barbados represented one of the few Caribbean colonies to have achieved a balanced sex ratio by mid-eighteenth century for African and European communities (Beckles 1993). White creole women’s relative scarcity in the Caribbean has fostered assumptions of their insignificance to the socioeconomic and cultural reproduction of their societies. Eighteenth-century historian Edward Long was generally complementary of their personable qualities, yet dismissed their social significance and value (Long 1774), a trope that arguably still influences historical approaches. Mair’s suggestion that white women were “peripheral to the consciousness” of their society is encapsulated in her oft-cited assessment of the differential social worth of Jamaican women: the “black woman produced, the brown woman served, and the white woman consumed” (Mair 1974). Mair’s words point to the knotty intersection of race and gender in shaping the contours of colonial women’s realities; by virtue of their gender, all women were “second-class” citizens, but as Linda Sturtz argues “in a world where the triumvirate of race, class and gender ordered society, the white woman simultaneously occupied a position of power based on race, class, and condition of freedom yet one of subordination based on gender” (Sturtz 2010). Sturtz’s insightful analysis should prompt more rigorous interrogations into the lived realities of white womanhood, and its strategic importance to the reproduction of white hegemony. This would substantively enrich our understandings of the racialised and gendered dynamic of colonialism and slavery, as well as the pernicious lingering contemporary effects of what Hartman (2007) refers to as the “afterlife” of slavery. Race-ing Gender, Gendering Race The history of white women in Caribbean plantation societies has to be understood within the larger Atlantic imperial context. Scholars agree that the rise of New World plantation slavery from the seventeenth century onwards was increasingly systematised through a nascent rhetoric of racial difference (Jordan 1968). “Race” increasingly functioned as the principal mode of colonial hierarchical social relations, but it was always intricately entangled with and inseparable from relations of gender, sexuality, and class (Jones 2007). Colonial slavery was a system of social control, and the patriarchal plantocracy’s authority rested on their stringent regulation of socio-sexual Citation: David Prior. White Women in British Caribbean Plantation Societies (Topical Guide). H-Slavery. 05-30-2016. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11465/pages/127503/white-women-british-caribbean-plantation-societies-topical-guide Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Slavery relations between women and men, black, coloured and white, wealthy and poor alike (Morrisey 1989). As the transatlantic slave trade advanced, and African slavery replaced white indentured servitude, colonists increasingly drew on biblical theories of difference to provide moral justification for enslaving Africans (Fredrickson 1971). Europeans magnified the perceived physical, moral, cultural and religious variation between themselves and “others” to construct hierarchical racial taxonomies. They drew on the biblical Great Chain of Being, reasoning that whites represented the epitome of human perfection and superiority, and relegating Africans to a liminal inferior status somewhere between humanity and primates (Malik 1996), as moral justification for the enslavement of an estimated thirteen million Africans. The “natural” right of European patriarchal authority over inferior “others” was increasingly upheld by some Enlightenment philosophers whose sophisticated deliberations on the nature of human variety undergirded discourses of Africans as an uncivilised, inferior species (see Hume 1742 and Kant 1775 in Eze 1997). Yet, as Anglo-Europeans mused on the ontological status of Africans and blackness they at the same moment engaged in existential meditations on the meanings of whiteness (Fredrickson 1997). That whiteness should logically represent the antithesis of blackness was clear. The subsequent valorisation of whiteness as the zenith of human perfection went hand in hand with the devaluation of blackness, with gender playing a crucial role in their deliberations and praxis. White masculinity epitomised rationality, culture, civilisation, and authority, while the feminine moral imperatives of virtue, piety, and purity were constitutive of ideals of white womanhood, which was dialectically opposed to meanings of black womanhood. The purported grotesque and bestial sexuality of “hot constitution’d” African women – inherently possessed of a voracious bestiality that they would even copulate with orang-utans – their monstrous, ugly black bodies, and excessive fertility – itself a metaphorical trope for the Dark Continent – cast African women outside of normative womanhood (Bush 1990; Morgan 2004), their bodies representative of the very extremities of race and gender difference (Morgan 2004). And yet, as Young (1995) argues, white males’ avowed repulsion of black women’s alterity coexisted in uneasy tension with eroticised representations of and sexual desire for the primitive hyper-sexualised
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