Engendering History

EngenderCaribbean Women

inHistorical Perspective

-ingHistory

Verene edited by Shepherd

Bridget BreretonBarbara Bailey

Palgrave Macmillan

ENGENDERING HISTORY

Copyright © 1995 by Department of History, U.W.I.,Mona, Jamaica 1995.

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1995 978-0-312-12765-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address: St. Martin's Press Scholarly and Reference Division 175 Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y. 10010

Book and cover design by Prodesign Ltd., Jamaica

ISBN 978-0-312-12766-4 ISBN 978-1-137-07302-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-07302-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

First Edition 1995

in memory of

ELSA GOVEIA

and for

LUCILLE MATHURIN-MAIR

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

SECTION ONE History and Ciender Analysis: Theoretical Perspectives

1. Through an African Feminist Theoretical Lens: Viewing Caribbean Women's History Cross-culturally

'R.c-t.I'IL~fn "terfi.c-r~..:Penn

2. Writing Gender into History: The Negotiation of Gender Relations among Indian Men and Women in Post-indenture Trinidad Society, 1917-47

.:P vrtr~i~t 111m~

3. Gender Politics and Imperial Politics: Rethinking the Histories of Empire

e ~ttfr-erine M liLt

SECTION TWO Text and Testimony: Sources and Methods for 'Engendering' Caribbean History

4. Text, Testimony and Gender: An Examination of some Texts by Women on the English-speaking Caribbean, from the 1770s to the 1920s

Er'i~et Brereto-n

ix

xi

3

20

48

63

v

Engendering History

5. Gender and Memory: Oral History and Women's History 94

"f11~tr~ e~r-~tm/Jert;Un

6. Pictorial Sources for Nineteenth-Century Women's History: Dress as a Mirror of Attitudes to Women 111

9tDr~ 'Rb/Jert.sbn

SECTION THREE Women and Slavery

7. Sex and Gender in the Historiography of Caribbean Slavery 125

'Mit~tr~ 'Eu;{de.s

8. The Female Slave in Cuba during the first half of the Nineteenth Century 141

Z>i~n~~ e ~~.st.VUA~t 9. Women, Work and Resistance in the French Caribbean

during Slavery, 1700-1848 155

'Eern~~rA "711bitt

10. Street Vendors, Pedlars, Shop-Owners and Domestics: Some Aspects of Women's Economic Roles in Nineteenth-Century San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1820-1870

~diJt V. "711~ttb.s-'RbArf~tuz.

SECTION FOVR Women in the Post-Slavery Period

11. Victims or Strategists? Female lodging-house keepers in Jamaica

::P ~ette A . /<-err

12. Women, Land Transactions and Peasant Development in Jamaica, 1866-1900

Verbnt "711. S~ttclr-dt

13. Gender, Migration and Settlement:

vi

The Indentureship and Post-indentureship Experience of Indian Females in Jamaica, 1845-1943

Verene A. Slr-eplr-erA

176

197

213

233

Contents

14. Access to Secondary Education for Girls in Barbados, 1907-43: A Preliminary Analysis 258

0 ~tnu: e '111~t¥er b

SECTION FIVE

Women, Protest and Political Movement

15. 'Females of Abandoned Character'? Women and Protest in Jamaica, 1838-65

Swtt~in ~itmcl

16. Social and Political Motherhood of Cuba: Mariana Grajales Cuello

0 e~tn StuV.V.b

17. Women of the Masses: Daphne Campbell and 'left' Politics in Jamaica in the 1950s

.Linnette V l'tbdt

SECTION SIX Comparative Perspectives

279

296

318

18. Women and Infanticide in Nineteenth-century rural France 337

0 ttnl'tt~l'tn ;()~'((,).¥

19. The Status, Role and Influence of Women in the Eastern Delta States of Nigeria, 1850-1900: Examples fromNew Calabar 369

~ l'tivinte £, ~ ~triP!tk.tt 20. Women and Plantations in West Cameroon since 1900 384

l<i.:~mA. 9ttttA.ri~e

Notes on Contributors 403

vii

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Preface

With the exception of the articles by Patricia Mohammed, Verene Shepherd, Swithin Wilmot and Hilary Beckles (whose symposium paper was on women in cricket), the articles included in this volume represent a selection of papers presented at an international symposium titled 'Engendering History: Current Directions in the Study of Women and Gender in Caribbean History', held at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus from November 10-12, 1993. The symposium was hosted by the Department of History in association with the Mona Centre for Gender and Development; and we thank our colleagues sincerely for entrusting us with the responsibility of editing this selection of papers.

On behalf of the Department of History, we should like to acknowledge the financial assistance toward the publication of this selection of Symposium papers which was provided by OXFAM, the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica (PCJ), Petrojam and the University of the West Indies Research and Publications Fund. We thank Carol Thompson for wordprocessing services and Florizel Allen, Augustin Charles, Jonathan Dalby and Waibinte Wariboko for assistance with proof-reading.

We are grateful to Dr Patrick Bryan, Head of the Department of History, Mona, and Verene's husband Bramwell Shepherd, for so kindly lending us their services in the editing and prpofreading of articles which were translated from Spanish. We also thank Professor Barry Higman for his willingness to read and comment on draft sections of the book.

We wish to thank all who helped to make the symposium a success: Mrs. Linnette Vassell who did much to push the idea of this Symposium; other colleagues in the Department of History and the Centre for Gender and Development who worked tirelessly on various committees and sub-committees; Mrs. Hope Senior, Miss Juliet Williams and Miss Vanessa Ellis who had the mammoth task of producing 200 copies of each of the original 32 papers; members of staff of other Faculties and Departments of the UWI and the wider University Community; UWI

ix

Engendering History

students co-opted to help in preparatory work; presenters and other participants; sponsors from the University community, the private sector, women's organisations and international funding agencies. Without your support neither the symposium nor this book would have become a reality.

Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the staff of Ian Randle Publishers for the professional way in which they went about the business of transforming the typescript into book form.

X

Verene Shepherd Bridget Brereton

Barbara Bailey

Introduction

Since the emergence of women's history as a definable field in the last 25 years there has been an increase in the production of historical works on women, which have dramatically altered the epistemological foundations of history. Women's history is now an established area of discourse in many parts of the world. Its wide-ranging impact is evident in the fact that scholars from across the disciplines support the call for greater attention to the influence of historical processes on the lives of women and a more critical evaluation of the influence of historical contexts on the ideological production of notions about women.

In a sense, the emergence of women's history can be located within the context of the development of social history, with its 'democratic' tendencies and its call for the writing of history from the perspective of traditionally marginalised groups. Another impetus was the 1960s civil rights movement in the USA which in itself had its genesis in slavery and the resistance against slavery. This struggle was over the recognition of minority rights, mostly of African-Americans. During the same decade, the feminist movement in the USA and in Europe re-emerged on the public stage, sharing much of the discourse of the civil rights movement in its struggle for the rights of subordinated women. The revitalised feminist movement was thus able to fashion its appeal and its self-justification within the prevailing rhetoric of equality. The women's movement played a critical role in raising key questions such as what accounts for women's situation as 'other' and what perpetuates it historically. In answering these questions, academic feminists and other scholars used an explicitly historical approach as this could enable feminist theory to fulfill its potential for radically changing the existing epistemologies. Therefore women's history became regarded as central -not tangential- to feminism.

Women's history challenged the androcentric ideology inherent in historical discourse. Scholars claimed that to effect meaningful change it

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Engendering History

was not sufficient to add women to the existing history, thereby creating a parallel history. They urged the questioning of methodological assumptions and the modernist notions in which history was regarded as universal, with no attention to the differences between the historical experiences and realities of men and women. Scholars, and academic feminists in particular, called for a new history which would not only be about great people, government, diplomacy, state building, formal religions, trade and warfare, all of which were areas in which men were the principal actors, except of course where there was a powerful woman like Queen Isabella or Nanny of the Maroons who could not be ignored. Rather, they called for a history which would show that women's concerns and activities were different from men's; that women were not peripheral but were very much integral to history.

To correct this imbalance in historical discourse, historians of women developed a multiplicity of perspectives. Some adopted a more descriptive and compensatory approach in this reconstruction of historical knowledge. Some, viewing the neglect of women in historical discourse as part of women's experience of oppression, began by cataloguing areas of neglect and female oppression. Others wrote biographies of outstanding women; some narrated the history of women's contribution to political struggles like slave resistance, the suffrage movement, reform movements, the emancipatory struggles, all the time redefining the meaning of politics. Still others adopted a multidisciplinary approach, finding useful approaches in the methods of anthropologists, linguists, sociologists and literary writers.

Other historians went a step further and began to look for ways to include a type of analysis which had been omitted from historical discourse and which would produce a feminist standpoint and therefore a better picture of reality. These scholars challenged the existing paradigms and methodologies and the validity of existing canonical historical knowledge. They called for new empirical data and new analytical perspectives which could be used in the reconstruction and redefinition of historical knowledge to produce a gendered history. In this process of re-evaluation, the concept of gender began more and more to be used as an analytical tool not only to change the perspective of the traditional history, but to alter the historical epistemologies; for only by studying the social relations between the sexes could one begin to understand ideas about the division of labour, sexual difference and its construction, social organisation and political ideologies. In other words, gender analysis could lead to a rewriting of history which would re-evaluate the meaning of maleness and femaleness and restore a balance in the history of men and women.

As part of the mandate to question the assumptions which governed the study of history, scholars directed their scholarship to new fields of research which would provide heroines as well as heroes, challenge the

xii

Introduction

traditional chronologies of historical events and employ gender analysis in understanding the relations between the sexes. They also identified the conceptual weakness of perceiving women's history as homogeneous and therefore also the danger of universalising the new discourse. They pointed to the need to take differences based on gender as well as race, class, colour, caste, nationality and occupation into account in reconstructing Caribbean history:

This heterogeneous approach, which gained wider appeal on account of the growing attention to multiculturalism, was even more crucial for understanding Caribbean women's experiences which often departed from the universalising discourse of western scholars.

The integration of a feminist empirical approach, which uses gender and other intersecting variables as an analytical tool, with the historical discourse on the Caribbean, developed only in the 1960s and 1970s. Caribbean historians were late in realising the epistemological and pedagogic importance of utilising this approach for the construction of women's history. Influenced by prevailing ideas in the discipline which saw women's experiences as trivial or non-historical, and by aspects of Marxist ideology which confined women to the private sphere in the division of labour, the pre-1960s texts tended to dichotomise the activities and experiences of men and women into the categories of: public vs. private; work vs family; and personal vs political. These approaches masked the true contribution of women to Caribbean history and not only left them out of the history books but resulted in a distorted historical account which only partially represented the reality.

The neglect of Afro-Caribbean and Asian women in Caribbean history was less understandable than that of middle-class, white and mixed-race women. While elite and middle-class women came under the influence of patriarchy and later the Victorian ideology, working-class women -before and after slavery - had never neatly fitted into the prevailing dichotomies which sought to create mutually exclusive categories of wage labour in the public sphere and non-compensatory labour in the private/ domestic sphere.

Information on women in the Caribbean was not entirely absent, for historians possessed the contemporary writings of Europeans and others who observed Caribbean society from the late fifteenth century. These works, of course, utilised justificatory language, written as they were in a period when European colonisation efforts were at their zenith. Those written in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were often couched in the language of the pro-slavery ideologue and were aimed at impeding the emancipation struggles on both sides of the Atlantic. These biased accounts therefore portrayed Caribbean enslaved women as physically unappealing, uncouth, lazy and in need of the 'civilising' influence of slavery. Other writings of the same era, by persons

xiii

Engendering History

sympathetic to the anti-slavery movement, were less overtly hostile to slave women but still revealed racist and classist biases.

Since the 1960s, and beginning with the pioneer work of Lucille Mathurin-Mair, the androcentric biases of early Caribbean histor­iography and the racist and sexist ideologies of the contemporary literature have been increasingly challenged.

In addition to purely historical works, Caribbean historians have benefited from the work of sociologists and specialists in gender studies. In this regard, the Women in the Caribbean Project and the subsequent establishment of an academic Centre for Gender and Development Studies on each of the three campuses of the University of the West Indies were critical. The major objective of these two initiatives was to provide a database to further the understanding of the position of women in contemporary Caribbean society from a historical perspective and so influence the transformation of social structures and male-female relationships in all spheres of activity within the region. To this end scholars, particularly feminist scholars, in a number of disciplines became engaged in a process of testing established assumptions and theories and exploring phenomena of particular importance to women which had hitherto been ignored or marginalised. At the same time, they introduced a feminist methodological approach to this process of knowledge-building.

The establishment of gender studies as a legitimate area of academic discourse has facilitated the engendering of mainstream academic fields through more adequate and valid epistemologies. History is one of the disciplines which has benefited from this illumination.

These developments have yielded a solid body of research data about the historical experience of Caribbean women. It seems fair to say that the first or 'retrieval' phase of Caribbean women's history has made considerable progress. Less has been done in terms of the second phase, that of applying gender analysis to Caribbean history.

Of course, the research still does not reflect the historical experiences of all groups of women in the Caribbean. The primary focus of the research has been on the experiences of enslaved black women, with only limited attention to coloured women, white working-class and elite women, and nineteenth-century immigrant women. This research pattern is caused by several factors, among which are the increased focus of anthropologists and sociologists since the 1950s on black women's roles in Caribbean family structure during and after slavery and an earlier imperialist scholarship which conceptually subsumed white and coloured women to their male counterparts in assessments of agricultural and mercantile activities in colonial culture. Additionally, immigrant women, coming to the Caribbean after the abolition of slavery, especially from Asia, formed a comparatively small section of the total populations, particularly in Jamaica and the French and British Windward Islands, and as such were

xiv

Introduction

perceived as having been marginal to the larger historical process. Predictably, not much research effort has been applied to the study of their historical experience. This is despite the fact that they were crucial in the continuation of the capitalist plantation system in the post-slavery and post-indentureship periods. Recently, however, scholars have begun to address this imbalance in the research.

The articles in this volume testify to the remarkable amount of research effort which has been applied to the study of Caribbean women's history, and the ongoing attempts to rewrite history based on the ever-emerging new contexts. They seek not only to add new empirical data on women to the fund of historical knowledge, since that would simply be writing a compensatory history, but also to re-problematise existing theory, and critique the dominant systems of knowledge. The majority of articles, in the tradition of the prevailing scholarship, focus on African and African-Caribbean women, but there are also articles on white European, mixed-race (coloured) and Asian women, in the quest to avoid writing a totalising Caribbean women's history. The Caribbean, after all, represents a diversity of ethnic groups, the result of the great voluntary and involuntary migratory movements from the sixteenth century. Caribbean women's historiography must be cognisant of the different experiences of women according to race or ethnicity, caste, class, colour, age, nationality, language, location (rural vs. urban) and occupation.

The book is divided into six sections which cover, chronologically, the period of slavery to the modern historical period. Geographically, the articles relate primarily to the Anglophone Caribbean; but some effort has been made to adopt a pan-Caribbean approach, with material included that is representative of the experiences of women in the Hispanic and the Francophone Caribbean. Since the Caribbean also did not develop in a vacuum but was shaped by historical developments in Africa, North America and Europe, the book includes articles which adopt a comparative perspective, linking the experiences of Caribbean women to their counterparts in other parts of the world, particularly those equally influenced by European colonialism.

In the first section, which is devoted to theoretical perspectives, Terborg-Penn, Mohammed and Hall focus on the problematic issue of discursively constructing a women's history which is representative of the multiple experiences of national and racial groups in the Caribbean, Britain and North America. They argue that as much of western feminism is based on the experiences and agenda of white, European elite women, there is an urgent need for gender analysis to take on board the experiences of Africans and Indo-Caribbeans, particularly in the context of a post-colonial world. Thus Terborg-Penn proposes an African feminist theoretical approach which encompasses not only the experiences of women on the continent but also in the diaspora. This enables the forging

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Engendering History

of a link with women in the Caribbean and elsewhere and makes an opportrmity for a cross-cultural analysis which can include issues of race, class, gender, religion, age and ethnicity. She examines the tenets and values of African feminism and demonstrates methods of application.

Mohammed posits another theoretical approach to the process of writing gender into history. Through the experiences of post-indenture migrant Indians in Trinidad, she examines how femininity and masculinity were reformulated in the period 1917-47. She argues that for each ethnic group or class in society, the construction of gender is carried out within the framework of a system of gender relations which may or may not be in the dominant system in that society at a given period.

Hall argues that historians of Britain and the British empire should urgently rethink ways of writing imperial histories. For centuries white British identities, both male and female, have been constructed through sets of assumptions about imperial power in relation to racialised 'others'. Imperial histories also contained negative images of women in the empire who were subjected to multiple forms of domination: imperialism, sexism and patriarchy. She argues that imperial relations have to be subjected to revision in a way which takes gender fully into account, and that there is a need to re-evaluate the ways in which men and women in the empire were conceptualised, particularly in the missionary discourse after the abolition of slavery.

In Section Two, (the title of which was inspired by a course developed at the UWI, Mona, by Barry Higman), the focus is on the variety of sources and methodological approaches to the study of Caribbean women's history. A concern of all the authors in this section is that in seeking to probe the gender dimension in the history of the Caribbean since European contact, one is largely dependent on documentary evidence generated by men. Some of this evidence represents a textual invention of the Caribbean, and demonstrates the dominative discourses of imperial powers such as Britain. There is a paucity of recorded testimony by women, as opposed to about women, which presents a difficulty in any attempt to reconstruct the social history of diverse groups of women in the region. Despite these difficulties, the three authors have been able to suggest new approaches and sources for the representation of the multiple experiences of women in the Caribbean. Brereton demonstrates the ways in which women's diaries, journals, private letters, autobiographies and female-authored texts can provide a rich source of evidence about women's historical experience in the Caribbean which can supplement the mainstream of documents generated by men and help provide a more nuanced view of Caribbean social history, its gender dimensions and its 'invisible women'. She examines nine sources, ranging chronologically from the 1770s to the 1920s and covering eight territories in the English-speaking Caribbean.

Chamberlain's article is based on oral history, the representation of the

xvi

Introduction

experiences of Barbadian emigrants to Britain. She shows how oral history has the potential to contribute to the interpretation of women's experiences and warns that this source should not be relegated to the periphery of historical enquiry and dismissed as untrustworthy and subjective. She shows that oral sources are different from conventional sources precisely because they deal with perception and subjectivity.

Robertson argues persuasively that dress is one of the most revealing mirrors of social attitudes and should be regarded as a serious source for social history rather than as a subject of marginal academic value. Dress is a mirror of class as it can set people of wealth and leisure apart from the middle and working classes. In the nineteenth century dress also mirrored differences in women's age, marriageability and marital status. Clothes at that period also reflected societies' general attitudes towards women as fragile and delicate. Changes in dress styles demonstrate socio-economic changes among the classes in society.

Section Three focuses on women during the slavery period and takes in the experiences of enslaved women in the Anglophone, Hispanophone and Francophone Caribbean. The articles demonstrate clearly that the enslaved woman was critical to the economic imperatives of the sugar plantation society which defined her life and experiences. The enslaved woman was acutely aware of her importance to the continuation of the capitalist plantation complex. It was armed with this realisation of her important role that she was able to devise strategies to subvert it.

The first article in Section Three is by Hilary Beckles who examines the implications of the recent historiographical shift from history to women's history and the conceptual and methodological problems which arise when a more gendered history is not pursued. This he demonstrates from data on the construction of the white and coloured women during slavery as opposed to the construction of the black woman. He argues convincingly that gender and race ideologies were principally at work in determining the division of labour and were responsible for the crystallisation of consciousness within the slave mode of production.

The second article is by Digna Castaneda who writes on the Cuban female slaves, particularly those in the western section of the island, in the first half of the nineteenth century. She argues that African slavery is seen with the greatest clarity and depth in the role and place of the Afro-Cuban woman in Cuban colonial society. She shows how the intersection of social class, race and gender manifested itself during slavery and how these elements became a means of exploitation. In the end the Cuban slave woman suffered from the multiple effects of being black, female and enslaved; yet they played critical economic and cultural roles in slave society.

Moitt's article analyses the social condition of enslaved black women in the plantation societies of the French Caribbean and the ways in which the organisation of labour had an impact on enslaved women's

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Engendering History

experiences, for enslaved women's occupations opened up to them a wide range of resistance strategies. To date, the majority of published studies on slave resistance have focused on the English-speaking Caribbean, so that this article will be essential for the development of a comparative, pan-Caribbean study of slave work and resistance strategies.

Matos-Rodriguez focuses on Puerto Rico, among the last outposts of slavery in the Caribbean. He shows the active participation and importance of women in lower sectors of retail, in domestic work, in food-selling and entertainment establishments in nineteenth-century San Juan. Unlike the other two articles in this section, Matos-Rodriguez' focus is on the urban sector and the discussion centres essentially on poor, coloured women. His objective is to show the solidarities and differences among working women in order to understand their lives from a historical perspective.

Section Four is located within the context of the post-slavery Caribbean, a fundamental period in the shaping of the social and economic experience of Caribbean women, the majority of whom were making the transition from slavery to freedom. The articles, by showing differences based on race, class and colour, reinforce the realisation by Caribbean historians that there is a homogenous Caribbean women's history. They also show that women were not peripheral to Caribbean post-slavery society; neither did they accept blithely attempts to marginalise them. While there were clear efforts to confine them to the private domestic sphere through a sex-discriminatory type of education, or to disadvantage them through dependence on male benefactors, and through the sex-typing of jobs where they remained in the public sphere of work, they clearly opposed such efforts of subordination. The articles by Kerr, Satchell, Shepherd and Mayers examine a range of issues, from coloured and black women's search for economic autonomy through property accumulation and peasant development and the running of taverns and lodging houses, to Indian women's participation in the labour force and the social experiences of female students who suffered from discrimination in the school system of Barbados.

Kerr explores the historical explanations for the evolution of a coloured female-dominated economic activity, that of lodging house keepers. She contends that the coloured woman emerged from a position relegated to her by dominant males where her opportunities were limited, with a number of avenues for social and economic success. Coloured females suffered from multiple oppression from the period of slavery on the basis of race, colour, gender and legal status. The main area of their victimisation, Kerr maintains, was their subservient and seemingly dependent relationship on white males for whom they were mistresses, lovers, and prostitutes, and who attempted to keep them in that bind by 'allowing' them to enter the occupation of lodging house keeper. But, as

xviii

Introduction

Kerr shows, these women were strategists rather than victims, turning what seemed like a disadvantageous position into economic and social strength.

Satchell focuses on women's roles in peasant development and as buyers and sellers of land. It is clear that land transactions were not gender-specific, though men dominated them. He also examines the discriminatory land-holding laws which affected married women in particular down to 1882. Women facilitated the development of the peasantry by disposing of land to both men and women. But women received far less land than they were selling. Women transferred a total of 225,000 acres but bought just 70,000 acres, between 1866 and 1900.

Shepherd focuses on the little-studied area of female Indians' historical experience in Jamaica, arguing that they were not marginal to the larger historical development of post-slavery Jamaica but, as contract workers, (and later free settlers), contributed to the continuation of the capitalist plantation system. The central objective of her article, though, is to demonstrate the ways in which gender considerations conditioned the Indian female experience of migration, indentureship and settlement in the host society. She rationalises the elevation of gender over race and class to a position of primacy in the immigrant experience by positing that race and class conflicts were not the only forms of struggle which immigrant women had to undertake in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Caribbean.

Mayers argues strongly that gender discrimination existed in the Barbados educational system in the period 1907-43 in terms of the physical facilities provided, as well as in the number of awards, which enabled winners to access education. The planter oligarchy dictated the pace of educational development in colonial societies as it had a vision of the needs of an agricultural society which would be ordered in their socio-economic interest. All the major reports on education seemed to recommend a structure organised to meet the requirements of a highly stratified society catering in different degrees to the upper, middle and working class. Race, class and gender were clearly factors which determined access to education in Barbados as in the rest of the Caribbean. The curriculum reflected the efforts to sex-type education so as to create in the Caribbean what European missionaries called the 'proper gender order'.

Section Five is devoted to the role of women in protest and political movements. The articles seek to reinterpret the meaning of politics, demonstrating clearly that despite the sexism and racism which initially denied black and coloured women the legal right to vote, the lack of the franchise did not exclude women from active participation in the public world of politics during slavery and in the post-slavery Caribbean. Women like Mariana Grajales of Cuba were active directly and indirectly in revolutionary struggles. Caribbean women, as Wilmot shows, opposed

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Engendering History

any attempt to impose upon them a 'proper gender order', according to which men worked for wages and the women were expected to retreat to the domestic arena to do uncompensated labour. As under slavery, they had an active role to play in the public sphere of work and acted as historical agents to refashion their economic role and protect their economic gains in post-slavery society. Denied access to the formal political process, the street became their political platform and they participated in street demonstrations and protests to protect their existing rights or claim new gains.

Stubbs focuses on the evolution and construction of the mother myth of Mariana Grajales Cuello, a symbol of Afro-Cuban resistance in the nineteenth century. Mariana is regarded as a strong revolutionary icon of Cuba and her role in Cuban history has taken on a political interpretation which ranges from liberal patriot to revolutionary. She has acquired legendary proportions as a heroic and valiant mother and her home was, indeed, a centre of social transformation. The mother of Antonio Maceo, the noted general in the Cuban revolutionary army in the war of 1868-78, she became noted for preparing her family for war during this period. She sacrificed horne, husband and children to the war and nine of her children in fact died in it. She herself joined the insurrection and ran hospitals and provision grounds in Antonio Maceo's base camps.

Vassell presents a stirring analysis of the role of Daphne Campbell in the political activities of modem Jamaica. Her objective is to give the working class a space to speak and reflect their experiences in society and the ways in which they have acted in social and political terms. She argues that the testimonies of women can provide a window on the issue of class tensions among women within the women's movement; on how women have perceived their own personal autonomy and how working-class women, despite the attempts to confine them to the so-called 'private' sphere, have transcended these boundaries to enter the 'public' sphere of politics. Her article also provides scope for exploring issues raised explicitly in the new women's history, African diaspora women's history and issues related to the definition of women's political action.

The articles in the final section are not totally focused on the Caribbean but cover topics which are of interest to Caribbean women's history and which have the potential to provide comparative perspectives. These articles on African and European women are particularly crucial in view of the prevailing preoccupation with the external influences on gender roles and women's experiences 'after the crossing'.

Through over 80 infanticide prosecution dossiers of the assize courts of the Department of Cantal in Central France between 1791 and 1899, Dalby seeks to answer certain questions: what motivated the practice of infanticide among women in rural France in the nineteenth century? Why infanticide rather than other alternatives such as abandonment? To what

XX

Introduction

extent were the motives of these women similar to those of other women in early modem Europe, and indeed the Caribbean? His analysis shows clearly that infanticide is quintessentially an issue of gender and a phenomenon which transcends the boundaries of culture. Infanticide is by definition a 'female crime' whose structural origins lie in women's subordination and alienation in a profoundly patriarchal society. In certain respects, as Dalby shows, infanticide was not only an act of self-justification, but almost one of emancipation, by which the mother in the absence of a support system sought to determine her own future.

Wariboko sheds new light on the historical development and transformation of New Calabar, one of the Eastern Delta States of Nigeria, by re-evaluating the influence, status and role of women as New Calabar responded to the tripartite forces of change: consular rule, transatlantic commerce and Christianity. He discusses, through a variety of documentary and oral sources, how New Calabar perceived the female image, potentials and capacities, through some of its extant myths and legends relating to the origins of communal socio-cultural and political institutions. His conclusions echo those of Caribbean writers: that while sexism, patriarchy and male domination existed in most societies, with women being given the opportunity to contribute to society in a subordinate position rather than as equals, women were not completely helpless, exploited and voiceless. They have sought redress for inequalities and have traditionally in all societies possessed the capacity to contribute to societal evolutionary development.

Finally, Goodridge looks at the general involvement of Cameroonian women in the socio-economic life of their communities and the impact on their lives of the intrusion of western, specifically British, colonial capitalism. A central aspect of his analysis is that, as in the Caribbean, the plantation provided the principal colonising agency in West Cameroon and is thus crucial to the study of the impact of colonialism upon women. By dealing with some of the more exploitative aspects of the plantation system, he counters aspects of the imperial tradition of African historiography which suggests that plantations were beneficial since they offered opportunities for women to take part in the ql.Odem economic sector through wage labour on, or sale of foodstuffs to, the plantations. While focusing on the impact on women of British colonial policies, Goodridge also examines women's responses to colonisjng agencies and institutions. Above all, Goodridge's article demonstrates the consistency in British colonial policies as they impinged on women, whether in the Caribbean or Africa, and their use of Victorian ideology and patriarchal notions to make decisions about women's economic and social roles.

The articles in this volume, then, build on the existing body of scholarship and seek to chart the development of an intellectual tradition which moves Caribbean and black women's experiences away fromthe margins of the historical discourse. It is hoped that the present volume,

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Engendering History

like the symposium from which it has emerged, will contribute to the second phase of Caribbean women's history, the 'engendering' of the region's past.

Notes

Verene 'Shepherd Bridget Brereton

Barbara Bailey

For further reading on historiographical and conceptual issues in women's history, see works such as:

1. H. Beckles, 'White Women and Slavery in the Caribbean' History Workshop, 36, 1993.

2. Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (Heinemann/lndiana, 1990)

3. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (Routeldge, New York, 1991)

4. Joan Kelly, Women, History & Theory (University of Chicago Press, Illinois, 1986)

5. S. Jay Kleinberg (ed), Retrieving Women's History (Berg/UNESCO, 1992)

6. P. Mohammed & C. Shepherd, [eds], Gender in Caribbean Development (UWI,WDS, 1988).

7. Linda J. Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism (Routeledge, New York, 1990)

8. Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (Columbia University Press, New York, 1986)

9. K. Offen, R.R. Pierson & J. Rendall, eds., Writing Women's History: International Perspectives (Indiana University Press, New York, 1986)

10. Joan W. Scott, Gender and The Politics of History (Columbia University Press, New York, 1988)

11. R. Terborg-Penn, S. Harley & A.B. Rushing, eds., Women in Africa and the African Diaspora (Howard University Press, Washington, 1987)

12. The 'dialogue' section of the Journal of Women's History (Indiana University Press)

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