Her Bondage, Her Freedom: White and Black Women in Caribbean Slavery

Slavery as an institution of anti-black racial bondage privileged whiteness, and created nuanced ways for (re) defining white women’s identity while providing peculiar opportunities for their self-determination and autonomy.  Recent conceptual shifts towards gender and women’s history have forged new explorations of Caribbean slave societies as more than one of men’s dominance and feminine subordination, to seeing them as sites for empowering white women as autonomous social and economic agents. The removal of white women from historical obscurity forces a (re) configuration of traditional analyses of the enslaved experience of bondage and the character of their resistance.  Using domestic feminist theory and gendered analyses of power, this paper explores the nature of white women’s exploitation of black enslaved labour within the great house, and the place of race, class, gender and mobility in shaping mistresses/enslaved relations.
Through the use of private family correspondence, female authored diaries and travel narratives, this paper investigates the ways in which white mistresses controlled the labour power of their workers.  Such investigations take place in the context of women’s shared biological identity that transcends racial and gendered separateness, giving rise to mutual respect if not alliances and friendship between black and white women.  By situating this paper within current historiographical discourses of power, it suggests that the nature of white women’s exploitation of blacks was based both on the power of her whiteness to exploit the enslaved and her sense of her own feminine vulnerabilities.  This dialectic of empowerment and vulnerability stood at the heart of negotiated relations between white and black women, resulting in violent and brutal exploitation, on the one hand, and mutual deference, companionship and shared intimacies across the racial divide, on the other.