New Narratives from the Archive: Imagining the Lives of "Whores" and "Wenches"

I will discuss the methods by which I uncover the lives of two unnamed women in early modern Barbados (one Irish servant, one enslaved African) who were reduced in their brief archival inclusion to their economic and sexual worth. In an attempt to circumnavigate the inequities of the source material, I married the traditional tools of the historian (carefully constructing the possibilities of their experiences in the Bridgetown household in which they lived and labored) with a literary imagining of their lives. Not only did this approach bring bring each woman more fully into view, it also allowed me to grapple with the dynamics of power and control in the lives of subordinated women in new and interesting ways.