Abstract
This article details and analyses the social condition of enslaved black women in the plantation societies of the French Caribbean from 1700 to 1848, when slavery was abolished in the French colonial empire. It focuses primarily on the organisation of labour and its impact on slave women in Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint-Domingue and French Guiana. It shows that gender was not a consideration in the allocation of most tasks; that women did proportionately more hard labour than men; and that the allocation of tasks conditioned women’s responses to slavery, including resistance.
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Endnotes
Jean-Baptiste (Père) Du Tertre, Histoire gènérale des Antilles habitées par les Français, 4 vols., 1671 reprint (Fort-de-France: Editions des horizons Caraïbe, 1973).
Lucien Abénon, La Guadeloupe de 1671 à 1759, 2 vols. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987), 1, p.7.
M. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Lois et Constitutions des Colonies Françaises de l’Amérique Sous le Vent, de 1550 à 1785, 6 vols (Paris, 1785–90); Lucien Petraud, L’Esclavage aux Antilles Françaises Avant 1789 (Paris: Hachette, 1897).
Gordon K. Lewis, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 66.
See for example Gabriel Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles Françaises, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle (Basse-Terre: Société d’histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1974); Antoine Gisler, L’esclavage aux Antilles Françaises (XVIIe–XIXe siècle) (Paris, Karthala, 1981); Gaston-Martin, Histoire de l’esclavage Dans les Colonies Françaises (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948).
Ariette Gautier, Les Soeurs de Solitude: la Condition Féminine Dans l’esclavage aux Antilles du XVIIe au XIXe Siècle (Paris: Editions Caribéennes, 1985).
See Gautier, Les Soeurs de Solitude; Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Hilary Beckles, Natural Rebels (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1989).
See N. Deerr, A History of Sugar, 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hull, 1949–50).
Rose Price, ‘Pledges on Colonial Slavery, to Candidates for Seats in Parliament, Rightly Considered’, cited in M. Craton and J. Walvin, A Jamaican Plantation: The History of Worthy Park (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), p. 191.
B. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 1.
Justin Girod-Chantrans, Voyage d’un Suisse dans différentes colonies d’Amérique, 1785 reprint (Paris: Tallandier, 1980) p. 142.
M. Poyen de Saint-Marie, De l’exploitation des Sucreries ou Conseil d’un Vieux Planteur aux Jeunes Agriculteurs des Colonies (Basse-Terre: Imprimerie de la République, 1792) p. 14.
Debien, Les esclaves, p. 138; Bernard Moitt, ‘Behind the Sugar Fortunes: Women, Labour and the Development of Caribbean Plantations during Slavery’, in S. Chilungu and S. Niang, (eds.) African Continuities (Toronto: Terebi Publications, 1989) p. 412.
Jacques Cauna, Au temps des Isles à Sucre (Paris: Khartala, 1978), p. 114.
Gabriel Debien, ‘Sucrerie Breda de la Plaine du Nord (1785)’, Notes d’histoire Coloniale # 100 (1966), p. 36.
Michael Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978) p. 146.
Hilary Beckles, Afro-Caribbean Women and Resistance to Slavery in Barbados (London: Karnak House, 1988), p. 17.
André Lacharière, De l’affranchissement des esclaves dans les colonies Françaises (Paris: Eugène Renduel, 1836), p. 107.
Victor Schoelcher, Des colonies françaises: abolition immédiate de l’esclavage (Basse-Terre: Société d’histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1976) pp. 23–24.
Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, (New York: Norton, 1973) p. 194.
Christian Schnakenbourg, Histoire de l’industrie Sucrière en Guadeloupe aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1980), I, p. 36.
Jean-Baptiste Rouvellat de Cussac, Situation des Esclaves des Colonies Françaises (Paris, 1845), p. 43.
Craton, Searching, p. 203; M. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor (London: John Murray, 1834), p. 86.
Rum accounted for 10–33 per cent of plantation revenues, according to Stein. See Richard Stein, The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), p. 72.
Ibid, p. 442. See also, Debien, Les Esclaves, p. 184; Anne-Marie Bruleaux et al., Deux siècles d’esclavage en Guyane Française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986), p. 36.
Pierre de Vassière, Saint-Domingue (1629–1789) (Paris: Perrin, 1909), p. 168.
Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, 3 tomes (Paris: Société d’histoire des colonies françaises, 1958), I, p. 33.
Nicole Vanony-Frisch, Les Esclaves de la Guadeloupe à la fin de l’ancien Régime Dçaprès les Sources Notariales (1770–1789), extract from Bulletin de la Société de la Guadeloupe, Nos. 63–64 (1985), p. 89.
Jean Fouchard, Les Marrons de la liberté (Paris: Editions de l’école, 1972) p. 289.
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© 1995 Department of History, U.W.I., Mona, Jamaica
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Moitt, B. (1995). Women, Work and Resistance in the French Caribbean during Slavery 1700–1848. In: Shepherd, V., Brereton, B., Bailey, B. (eds) Engendering History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07302-0_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07302-0_9
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