Contesting the boundaries of gender,race and sexuality in Barbadian plantation society

After decades of scholarly neglect, the pivotal roles played by enslaved African women in the sociocultural and economic development of New World plantation societies is finally receiving critical attention as historians embark on gendered reappraisals of Caribbean history. Understanding how African women experienced slavery has considerably enriched our knowledge of the complexity of gender, race and sexuality in structuring colonial social relations. However, considerably less attention has focused on the experiences of white women within these societies. Dismissed, at best, as the languid and leisured wives of male planters, and at worst, as a socially and economically unproductive parasitical category, white Caribbean women arguably constitute the most marginalised of social actors within Caribbean history. This article seeks to disrupt the uncritical representations that frame our epistemological understanding of the experiences of white colonial women. Taking the plantation society of Barbados as a case study, the author argues that white women were crucial actors in the reproduction and social stability of successful slave economies. In Barbadian plantation society, ideologies of white supremacy legitimised African slavery, and race became the principal mode of social stratification.     

‘Sable venus’, ‘she devil’ or ‘drudge’? British slavery and the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities,c. 1650–1838

Abstract

In this article, the author addresses the problem of how much historians can understand about the identities of individuals living in a different epoch in time, in relation to what has been termed the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities in slavery and freedom. A central argument is that stereotypes of black women were highly gendered and clustered around contradictory representations, particularly the ‘Sable Venus’, ‘She Devil’ and passive ‘drudge’. Thus, the persistence of an African-centred ‘woman's culture’ and strategies of resistance, collaboration and survival are vital to understanding black women's self-defined (as opposed to white attributed) identities. The first section examines the relationship between gender, race and culture in the mediation of African and slave women's identities. This is followed by a critical deconstruction of the ‘Sable Venus’ and interrelated black and white gendered identities in colonial slave society. The final section analyses the importance of the ‘She Devil’ in representing the resistant slave woman who defied the ‘fabulous fiction’ of white stereotyping of black women. A wide time span is adopted in order to analyse how black women's relationship to the gendered power structures underpinning colonial slavery shifted over time, as did ‘white visions’ of their identities. Unifying themes are the central location black women had in the development of colonial relations between black and white and the implications of contact at the harsh interface of African and European cultures for black women's gendered identities.     

Prostitution, morality crusades and feminism: German-Jewish feminists and the campaign against white slavery

Feminism did not come easily to Germany's middle-class Jewish women. Moral outrage against white slavery and prostitution, however, led many religious housewives to join the Jüdischer Frauenbund (League of Jewish Women), a Jewish feminist organization. Their attitudes towards their ‘victimized’ or ‘erring young sisters’, their motivations for fighting white slavery, and the tactics they employed in their campaigns are examined in this essay. While they emphasized the virtues of purity and invoked Jewish ethical codes, theirs was not simply a morality crusade. The feminist founders of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (JFB) struggled to persuade their more conservative followers that the sexual abuse of women was linked to their inferior status in German society and Jewish culture. These leaders successfully convinced JFB members to take a giant step beyond their traditional family roles and charitable activities in order to challenge sexism. Thus the fight against white slavery became instrumental in serving wider feminist goals.     

‘Fresh attractions’: white slaveryand feminism in New Zealand, 1885–1918

Abstract

New Zealand women participated in an international debate over white slavery from the late nineteenth century. Features of that debate were common to several countries, but local commentators drew upon New Zealand's colonial position to evoke images of old-world ills in a new country. Ironically, however, New Zealand women were not convinced of the existence of white slavery in their country. As part of a catalogue of men's sexual and social oppression of women, the portrayal of gender relations in the anti-white slavery campaign was stark, but deliberate. In their demands that men take responsibility for ensuring that women had the right to walk the streets in safety, New Zealand feminists deployed the rhetoric of white slavery to argue for women's sexual and social freedom.     

Colonial labour,Tawdenni and ‘L’enfer du sel’: the struggle from slave to free labour in a Saharan salt mine

Abstract

Can we understand the arrival of Capitalism in Africa by tracking labour – from unfree to free, from slave to wage? The question supposes slavery to lie at its heart, yet the conversation between labour and slave studies is in early stages. The sources are problematic: the colonial ‘language of labour’ was often political rhetoric camouflaging ongoing forms of slavery. Then, there was the question of how the metropole-incorporated colonies into its economy: French West Africa’s sun and sand offered few economic resources. One was salt. The Niger Bend economy depended on Tawdenni, a desert salt mine controlled by Saharans and exploited by their slaves. In 1910, it was predicted that the French abolition of slavery would spell the end of Tawdenni: “Never will a man from the South – unless a slave – give himself to this work”; what, therefore, was to be done? The paper challenges the view that engagement with colonial capitalism necessarily led directly or even inevitably from slavery to wage labour by exploring how Tawdenni’s servile labour system responded to French colonial attempts to combine political abolition and economic sustainability.     

Harriet Clisby’s ‘Sketches of Australia’: travel writing and colonial refigurations in Boston’s Woman’s Journal

During the late nineteenth century, the British-born Australian physician Harriet Clisby became involved in the vibrant social reform circles of Boston, Massachusetts. Her ‘Sketches of Australia’, a journalistic series of travel writings, were published in the reform-oriented Woman’s Journal in 1873. This series provides insight into the discursive construction of Australian colonial society in a transnational context. Thematically, the ‘Sketches’ explored questions of geography, culture, class, labor, ethnicity, race, and gender, often embracing popular scientific discourses about race and universalist visions of women’s rights. While such perspectives were common among Anglophone social reformers of the era, Clisby also portrayed Australia as a multiracial nation of immigrants rather than as a collection of white settler colonies. By making colonial Australia accessible for a specifically American readership, the ‘Sketches’ also established a sense of a budding international relationship between Australia and the United States prior to the twentieth century.     

‘Writing from the Fringe of Empire’: understanding the gaps,silences and underlying whiteness in Jane Sarah Doudy’s literary works

Jane Sarah Doudy was a writer who often wrote to project an image of an ideal colonial community. Embedded within this literary construction were very clear ideas about cultural norms, colonial patriotism and racial hierarchies. Her literary works, however, have been shelved and forgotten for the better part of seventy‐five years. They have been revisited here to provide a fresh new site for acknowledging the political, cultural and historical significance of white settler women’s narratives and for understanding how one woman’s ‘dialogue of domination’ reveals much about the complex interracial boundaries and relationships that often occurred on the fringes of empire.     

‘White Already to Harvest’: South Australian Women Missionaries in India

In 1882, the South Australian Baptist Missionary Society sent off its first missionaries to Faridpur in East Bengal. Miss Marie Gilbert and Miss Ellen Arnold were the first of a stream of missionary women who left the young South Australian colony to work in India. Scores of women from other Christian denominations and from other Australian colonies also went to India and indeed to other mission fields in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As with other western women missionaries, these women intended to save souls and to bring India's daughters to Christ, often by means of medical work. But unlike their British sisters, these women came from the edge of empire to intervene in another, but different, colonial site. These missionary ventures coincided with efforts of the Australian settlers to elaborate for themselves an identity separate from and against that of the metropolitan centre. Within these debates, contestations over the meaning of ‘the colonial girl’ and ‘the Australian girl’ played a key role. The article explores why the women were drawn to India rather than to working with Aboriginal people in Australia. It begins to investigate how in seeking to reconstruct Indian womanhood they elaborated for themselves a separate colonial, Australian identity and how much in their missionary endeavours they affirmed an identity as white, Christian and ultimately British.     

Orientalist Sociology and the Creation of Colonial Sexualities

In what Arjun Appadurai has dubbed the ‘colonial imaginary’ issues of femininity, and who possessed it, were of prime importance. An orientalizing sociology sought to distinguish, and indeed to fix, differences between metropolitan and indigenous women as a rhetoric of hierarchy which secured proper and western femininity to white women. One critical route which colonial commentators and authorities took to produce that knowledge was to measure women's proximity to the practice of prostitution, a means which permitted discussion and judgement of racialized sexualities as well as of proper models of feminine behaviour. This article will explore the ways in which the new sociology of the Victorian period, wielded in a colonial context, served to separate women through race-based ideas of sexual behaviour and sexual order. It will deal with British India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.     

Labiaplasty,Race and the Colonial Imagination

This article seeks to interrogate the cultural meaning of cosmetic labiaplasty surgery (CLS) in the Western context through a historical examination of the symbolic function of the labia in relation to the construction of racial difference in early colonial race science discourse. It seeks to think through CLS as materially invested in a transnational masculinist imperial encounter with indigenous women from the Cape of Good Hope, who were identified in the race sciences of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries as ‘Hottentots’ (and sometimes ‘Bushwomen’). We suggest that the production of desire in contemporary CLS practice and discourse has its roots in colonial anthropological Western representations of black female sexuality. The fear of abnormality so strikingly invoked in the medical literature and contemporary accounts of women's desire for CLS appears as a displacement of racial abjection onto the genitals and a production of the female body as the border object upon which the desire for whiteness is transcribed. We identify two interlocking features of this production of white desire: the rejection of the animal body and the correction of sexual deviancy, both of which are articulated through race, specifically the racialised ‘Hottentot’ bodies conjured up by the white, colonial imagination.     

Historicizing Slavery in West Indian Feminisms

This paper traces the evolution of a coherent feminist genre in written historical texts during and after slavery, and in relation to contemporary feminist writing in the West Indies. The paper problematizes the category ‘woman’ during slavery, arguing that femininity was itself deeply differentiated by class and race, thus leading to historical disunity in the notion of feminine identity during slavery. This gender neutrality has not been sufficiently appreciated in contemporary feminist thought leading to liberal feminist politics in the region. This has proved counter productive in the attempts of Caribbean feminist theorizing to provide alternative understandings of the construction of the nation-state as it emerged out of slavery and the role of women themselves in the shaping of modern Caribbean society.     

Heterosexuality and Race in the Australian Same-Sex Marriage Postal Survey

ABSTRACT

This article argues that race and class are central aspects of sexual citizenship in a Australia. It does so by investigating representations of heterosexuality that were produced and circulated during the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey. Engaging with feminist and critical race theorists, we position same-sex marriage as not exceptional but part of a wider distribution of sexual citizenship within Australia's ongoing settler colonial history. We do so by introducing a number of illustrative examples of representations of heterosexuality produced during the survey. These representations reveal how same-sex marriage perpetuated heterosexual authority by asserting claims to authenticity and the occupation of space. We observe how heterosexuality in the survey material reproduced fantasies linking these three themes, for example, in an authentic white heterosexual family who speaks from their suburban backyard. It reveals that ceding to a bifurcated view of either progressive or conservative voices forestalls rather than advances other visions which may exceed the limited imaginings of sexual citizenship offered by the white liberal settler colonial state.     

‘Magdalens and moral imbeciles’: Women's homes in nineteenth-century New Zealand

The potential for women's charitable work in nineteenth-century New Zealand was restricted by colonial women's initial isolation from each other and involvement in domestic life, and also by early government assumption of responsibility for welfare. Rescue work provided one of the few outlets for women's voluntary charity, and reflected the sanction given to women's role as a moral, civilising force in colonial society. It illustrates women's role in the development of social work, the limitations of this role in nineteenth-century New Zealand, and modifications to it in the space of three decades. The arguments used to justify women's involvement in rescuing ‘fallen’ members of their own sex were similar to those used in the later nineteenth-century, when women activists sought wider involvement in public life. It is argued that a power based upon moral influence was narrow in scope and ultimately restrictive in the New Zealand context.     

Colonial sedentarisation and subjugation: The case of the Banjaras of Berar 1850–1900

The Banjaras were a mobile community of central India. Portage of goods and services was their primary occupation. This brought them in contact with a whole spectrum of population from the plains to the hills. It also generated tremendous diversity within the Banjara society in terms of language, customs, beliefs and practices. It developed in them a rather casual, unorthodox and open attitude towards religion, family, and women. Many of the practices which were prohibited in the mainstream orthodox Hindu and Muslim society were freely practised in the Banjara Community. Practices such as courtship and pre‐marital sex; late marriage; widow re‐marriage and so on, were common social practices much to the suspicion of religious orthodoxy and the colonial state. Since the colonial state was ever suspicious and fearful of the moving people, the Banjaras became the target of colonial wrath. The main aim of the colonial state was to coerce the Banjaras to sedentirise into settled agriculture. The entire colonial police, bureaucracy and legal institution was organized to monitor and force the Banjaras to abandon their traditional lifestyle. This resulted not only in their cultural loss but also in their demographic decline. The Banjaras became the worst victims of colonial persecution and oppression. The famine cycle of 1890s hit the Banjaras the hardest. Even the mainstream Hindu and Muslim orthodoxy joined the colonial state in Banjara persecution. But the Banjaras struggled and resisted all attempts to exterminate their society and culture.     

Gendered Testimonies: Autobiographies,Diaries and Letters by Women as Sources for Caribbean History

Although history has been one of the main disciplines through which we can understand gender, the paucity of data written or recorded by women makes it more difficult for the historian to research women's lives in the past. In the Caribbean, this task has been made easier by the discovery of a few key sources which allow an insight into the private sphere of Caribbean women's lives. These records of women who have lived in the Caribbean since the 1800s consist of memoirs, diaries and letters. The autobiographical writings include the extraordinary record of Mary Prince, a Bermuda-born enslaved African woman. Other sources which have been examined are the diaries of women who were members of the elite in the society, and educated women who worked either in professions or through the church to assist others in their societies. Through her examination of the testimonies of these women, the author reveals aspects of childhood, motherhood, marriage and sexual abuses which different women – free and unfree, white, black or coloured – experienced. The glimpses allow us to see Caribbean women who have lived with and challenged the definitions of femininity allowed them in the past. It demonstrates that the distinctions created between women's private and public lives were as artificial then as they are at present.     

exorcizing the past: the slave narrative as historical fantasy

Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred is a hybrid text: part historical novel, part science fiction/fantasy and part slave narrative. The story transports a contemporary black heroine into 19th-century Maryland in order to explore, recreate and connect with African American narratives of identity. Providing two narrative strands, one in 19th-century Maryland and the other in 20th-century California, the text is able to juxtapose the realities of slavery with its legacy. Conflating these time-periods, Kindred aims to interrogate the marginalization of African American history, but specifically the role black women played in that history, in America's bicentennial year. While Butler adapts what has been regarded as the quintessential African American literary mode of the slave narrative, her fiction consciously draws upon a literary heritage that foregrounds narratives written by black women. Consequently, Kindred highlights the issues and concerns that directly affect the construction of black femininity and its role in the community of slaves as well as examining the historical pressure brought to bear on the configuration of contemporary African American womanhood. In doing so, Butler's fiction articulates the right of black women to intervene in their own construction and to inscribe the existence of black women in stories of originary identity. What this article seeks to explore is how Butler's fiction develops and extends the traditional slave narrative, how this is utilized in order to interrogate the ‘realities’ of both slavery and contemporary US society, and how effective the text is in challenging stereotypical representation of white and black femininity.     

Was there feudalism in Indian history?

The notion of an ‘Indian feudalism’ has predominated in the recent historiography of pre‐colonial India. This notion, in its different interpretations, has West European feudalism as the model for reference. At times the close resemblance of Indian feudalism to this model has been emphasised, while on other occasions its divergence from it has been given prominence. The manorial regime and the role of trade provide the points of departure for comparison in all such arguments. In this article the validity of ‘Indian feudalism’, whichever way it is defined, is questioned. The author compares the processes of agricultural production in medieval Europe and medieval India in terms of the respective ecologies and social structures and suggests a basic dissimilarity between them such as would make any comparison futile. He argues that unlike the structured dependence of the entire peasantry upon the lords in medieval Europe, pre‐colonial Indian society was characterised by self‐dependent or free peasant production.     

The sabotage of patriarchy in colonial Rhodesia,rural african women's living legacy to their daughters

Evidence from a University of Zimbabwe oral history project suggests that many rural women in colonial Rhodesia played an active role in undermining patriarchal customs which they experienced as oppressive. These women defied family norms by choosing their own marriage partners, prioritizing the formal education of their daughters and finding ways to generate income to secure greater degrees of autonomy. This study compliments other research which depicts women's primary form of resistance to be moving from rural to urban areas, by showing what options some women exercised while remaining within rural society.     

A materialist analysis of slavery and sharecropping in the Southern United States

The historical nature of Southern slavery and of the social relations established after its abolition have for a long time been a source of heated debate among American historians. During the last decades, historians have tended to divide into two camps: neoclassical economic historians, who identify slavery and sharecropping with capitalism, and social historians, more or less influenced by Marxism, who define them correctly as pre‐capitalist social relations. Yet the contributions of the social historians have been marred by their empiricist approach and by their reluctance to avail themselves of the theoretical tools provided by classical and Marxist political economy. This work examines Southern slavery and sharecropping in the light of the studies of the European Marxists on ancient slavery and of the works of the classical political economists and Marx on French metayage. This comparison reveals the pre‐capitalist though combined character of plantation slavery, and at the same time shows that the social relations established in the South after the abolition of slavery were, due to the defeat of the Radical Republicans’ plans for agrarian reform, akin to the social relations established in Europe during the age of transition from feudalism to capitalism. The result of these backward relations of production was to retard for a long time the economic development of the South, where the transition to capitalism took place from above’ (that is, through a compromise between the bourgeoisie and a pre‐capitalist class of landowners) in the most painful possible way for the working masses, and at the same time to sustain a system of oppression and discrimination against the black population which reinforced the racist prejudices born of slavery among whites — thus further weakening a working class already divided between immigrants and native white Americans, and strengthening the conservatism of American political life.     

‘The streets have been watched regularly’: the York Penitentiary Society,young working-class women,and the regulation of behaviour in the public spaces of York,c. 1845–1919

The York Penitentiary Society, a charitable female reformatory in York, aimed to transform ‘fallen’ women in the city into useful citizens through institutionalisation, domestic training, and moral and religious instruction. The Penitentiary focused on isolating its ‘inmates’ from wider society, but its moral reach extended far beyond the high walls of the Refuge, and the young women confined within. This article examines the York Penitentiary Society, and considers how it acted to police the streets and public spaces of York, and the behaviour of young women who populated them. In addition to adding detail to our understanding of the operation of female reform institutions, this study also adds to our knowledge on the unofficial policing of women’s behaviour in public space, and has significant implications for histories of urban life.