"Our Slumbers as Sweet on a Bed of Straw as on Down": Gender and Empathy in Loyalist Nova Scotia

Exiled women in Nova Scotia utilized collective suffering to build a cohesive emotional community. Among such loyalists, there remained a surreptitious inkling that both black and white colonists shared a common origin as refugees and entangled future as suffering exiles. This paper examines how white loyalist women empathized with their African counterparts, the limits of their compassion, and the wider effects in revolutionary Nova Scotia.