Slavery and Freedom Among Early American Workers by Graham Russell Hodges

Author:Graham Russell Hodges [Hodges, Graham Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765601124
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1998-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

* Douglas R. Egerton. Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

7

Reconstructing Black Women’s History in the Caribbean

These three trim books* offer excellent introductions to the vast, emerging history of black Caribbean women and stand as challenges to North American social historians to match their efforts. Despite the recent flood of literary and sociological studies on African-American women, social, feminist and ethnic historians have neglected this fruitful subject. Those wishing to learn more about black women in early America, for example, must rely on very few books and articles.1 The simultaneous arrival of three solid books on Caribbean women provides a major step forward for West Indian historiography and offers important lessons for North American scholars.

The three books are quite similar in intent and approach. Hilary Beckles, responding to the demands of female graduate students, attempts to expand existing conceptual and methodological approaches in order to provide a labor history of black women in Barbados. Barbara Bush’s concentration is primarily on Jamaica and other Anglophone colonies after the close of the slave trade in 1807. With skill and originality she emphasizes the power of sexual dynamics in the slave system and its resulting coloring of historical perceptions of black women. Marietta Morrissey ambitiously seeks to analyze the slave woman’s experience in British, Dutch, French, Spanish and Danish West Indies from a broad Marxist perspective to determine whether or not gender defined slave status. As she is making a large geographical survey, her findings speak to either Frank Tannenbaums’s “terms of the religious and cultural variations of slavery or to the stages of capitalist development suggested by his critics” p. 15). Second, gender study addresses for Morrissey the issue of the economic basis of Caribbean slavery. As might be surmised, Morrissey uses a materialist strategy, acknowledging slaves’ economic motives rather than an unequal structuralist explanation or study of slave culture. The latter she regards as unwarranted, exaggerated claims based on emotion and political intention. This final point sharply separates Morrissey from Beckles and Bush. Yet, because they agree that gender is the most prominent variable, the three authors assert that the slave woman’s history is sufficiently divergent from the male’s to require reassessment of Caribbean history.

On the surface, the three works are quite similar in approach. The authors weave chapters on domestic slavery, field work and garden plots, discussions of fertility and child-bearing, and family structure towards goals of explaining the prevalence of women’s resistance to slavery in the Caribbean. Although each offers some new evidence, their principal approaches are to reinterpret existing research in order to provide new frameworks for analysis rather than to introduce major new areas of evidence. These goals provide a firm platform on which future efforts can stand. As the organization, evidence and, often, conclusions of the three books are frequently close, this review concentrates on areas of agreement and contention in key methods and points of analysis.

The first important subject is the demography of Caribbean slave women.

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