Happy International Womens Day 2021

March is Women’s History Month. So this latest ‘Reparation Conversations’, done in collaboration with the Centre for Reparation Research at The University of the West Indies, outlines some reasons why Caribbean women deserve reparation. Verene Shepherd recalls the conditions of enslavement that gave rise to resistance to slavery as justification for the call for redress. Critical are the revelations in the Claims for Compensation supplied by Ahmed Reid from the UCL database, which demonstrate that British women were beneficiaries of the system of enslavement and shared in its financial gains. The article serves as the evidentiary basis of women’s involvement in, and profit from, African misery, and as the rationale for an appeal for women of conscience to become more active in the reparation movement.

In Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882), abolitionist and formerly enslaved man, Frederick Douglass, remarked: “When the true history of the antislavery cause shall be written, women will occupy a large space in its pages; for the cause of the slave has been peculiarly woman’s cause … . Not only did her feet run on ‘willing errands’, and her fingers do the work which in large degree supplied the sinews of war, but her deep moral convictions … found convincing and persuasive expression by her pen and her voice.” (Catharine R. Stimpson, Routledge Revivals)

While the context was the United States, this quotation is applicable to all societies based on African enslavement because of the evidence that points to how the burden and brutality of enslavement fell heavily on enslaved women and how they resisted. This article provides an overview of the exploitation of enslaved women, the ways in which power and law combined to dictate the institutional context of their lives, their political response to enslavement, the ways in which enslaver women benefited from enslaved women’s labour and the links between these and the reparation movement. As Hilary Beckles has said, mapping the itinerary of gender in Caribbean history enables us to sharpen our focus specifically on slavery as a constantly changing system of socio-sexual exploitation and control of women and to penetrate its internal dynamism as a mode of labour extraction, which can be seen in the political economy of enslavement.

Women represented approximately 30 per cent of the estimated 15 million Africans forcefully transported to the Caribbean from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Lucille Mathurin Mair and later writers inspired by her work have provided significant information on how women experienced colonialism, their place in the plantation work regime, the brutality they experienced under the system of African enslavement, their demonstration of agency to such brutality, and the inequity of enslaver compensation from their productive labour.

SUBJECTED TO EXPLOITATION

Once located in the Americas, women were enslaved in large numbers and subjected to various forms of exploitation and control, not least of those being categorised, along with their children, as property. Enslavers appropriated their reproductive lives using race/racism as justification for making them reproduce the status of enslavement. Sasha Turner and Katherine Paugh have shown that after the passing of the 1807 Abolition Act, women’s reproductive lives became part of the political discourse in Britain and in the colonies, and the politics of gradualism versus immediate Emancipation revolved around what Turner describes as women’s “contested bodies”. As planters/plantation managers became concerned about the impact of abolition on the main means of renewing the labour force, personal profits, and economic development in Britain, they directed their attention to black women’s bodies and their reproduction customs and practices, and the application of incentives to breed and grow children in order to encourage an increase of the population available to be enslaved and extend the plantation system.

On sugar plantations, women were involved in some of the most arduous tasks because they were essential to production and the economic rationale for slavery: weeding, planting, harvesting, working in the factories (where many lost fingers while feeding cane into the mill) and generally contributing to the productive processes. They laboured in enslavers’ residences as domestics and nursed the sick in the hot houses or plantation “hospitals”. They worked in coffee, cotton, livestock, and food production. Clearly, enslaved women were the backbone of the labour force, and their exploitation and dehumanisation were central to Europe’s enrichment. The constraints and intensity of the gang system meant that prime field workers (the majority women) worked far more than 40 hours per week, especially during periods of harvesting. The impact was low fertility and high infant mortality.

Added to the abuse of their bodies through an arduous field régime and severe punishment for perceived infractions of the “slave codes”, enslaved women experienced sexploitation. Colonial statutes and codes invested them with no rights over their own bodies. Thomas Thistlewood’s journals, the writings of Robert Wedderburn, whose Scottish father, James, abused Robert’s mother, Rosanna; and Orlando Patterson’s The Sociology of Slavery, show this. As a result, women used a variety of strategies (marronage, e.g.) to undermine the slave system. Gradualism was rejected by women whose radical approach to anti-slavery took the form of armed revolts. The records right across the Caribbean are full of examples of the consequences of the revolutionary actions of Lucille Mair’s “Rebel Women” and Beckles’ “Natural Rebels”: floggings, imprisonment, hangings, deportations, whether it was the 1760 war in Jamaica, the 1763 Berbice War (where the Dutch executed four women), the 1816 Barbados war, or the 1831-32 Emancipation war in Jamaica in which Ann, Jane, and Eliza were hanged. Such brutality was not confined to enslaver men, but was practised by planters’ wives and independent women enslavers, who were not of marginal historical importance.

REWARDED FOR BRUTALITY

Enslavers were rewarded for their brutality with compensation to the tune of £20 million at Emancipation, representing 40 per cent of British public expenditure. The Apprenticeship System, 1834-38, gave enslavers a further estimated £27 million. More than 46,000 claims were filed for an estimated 850,000 enslaved Africans in 21 colonies. About 30,000 (65 per cent) were filed on enslaved people in the Caribbean. Of 16,114 claims filed in Jamaica, 45 per cent were filed by women, with 2,973 submitted by absentees. Female enslavers or females connected to enslaver families benefited: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Maria Lang (plantations in Guyana and Grenada, £59,514); Elizabeth Winter (£25,934); Caroline Cachard (£3277.65.4 for 60 enslaved in Trinidad & Tobago); Hannah Hammill (£6942.68.1 for 164 enslaved people in St Lucia), and Susannah Lynch-Harper from Liverpool (£124.4.1 for seven in Jamaica).

Jamaican Amy Bailey commented on the injustice of planter compensation with nothing to the enslaved, calling it a grievous wrong and asking: “Was it not a subtle way of laying the foundation of what we have so much today – mental slavery? What must be the result? Helplessness, poverty.”

Colonialism, then, was not gender or race-neutral. The gendered political economy of slavery was manifested in the ways in which enslaver men and women, and their societies, expropriated the labour of the enslaved and extracted value from them. This understanding is crucial to present-day discussions around reparation. Just as enslaved women left tangible reminders that they never accepted enslavement uncomplainingly, but as rebel women, engaged in a protracted movement for freedom, so their descendants should continue the fight for justice in their names.

– Verene Shepherd is director of the Centre for Reparation Research, The University of the West Indies. Send feedback to reparation.research@uwimona.edu.jm.