A01=Marietta Morrissey
Author_Marietta Morrissey
British colonies slave women
Caribbean slavery
Category=JBSF1
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Category=NHTS
Danish colonies slave women
Dutch colonies slave women
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eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
French colonies slave women
gender inequality in Caribbean slavery
New World slavery
slave life
social conditions for slaves
Spanish colonies slave women
Product details
- ISBN 9780700631674
- Weight: 333g
- Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 08 Oct 2021
- Publisher: University Press of Kansas
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In this innovative study, Marietta Morrissey reframes the debate over slavery in the New World by focusing on the experiences of slave women. Rich in detail and rigorously comparative, her work illuminates the exploitation, achievements, and resilience of slave women in the British, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Danish colonies in the Caribbean from 1600 through the mid 1800s.
Morrissey examines a wide spectrum of experience among Caribbean slave women, including their work at home, in the fields, and as domestics; their roles as wives and mothers; their health, sexuality, and fertility; and their decline in status with the advent of industrialization and the abolition of slavery.
Life for these women, Morrissey shows, was much more hazardous, brutal, and fragmented than it was for their counterparts in the American South. These women were in a constant, dynamic struggle with men—both masters and fellow slaves—over the foundations of their social experience. This experience was defined both by their status as slaves and by gender inequality. On the one hand, their slave status gradually robbed them of their domain—the household economy—and created a kind of perverse equality in which slave women—like slave men—became “units of agricultural labor.” One the other hand, slave women were denied the access that slave men eventually gained to skilled agricultural work. The result of this gender inequality, as Morrissey convincingly demonstrates, was a further erosion of the status and authority of slave women within their own culture.
Morrissey’s study, which addresses significant issues in women's history and black history, will go far toward reshaping our perceptions of slave life in the new world.
Morrissey examines a wide spectrum of experience among Caribbean slave women, including their work at home, in the fields, and as domestics; their roles as wives and mothers; their health, sexuality, and fertility; and their decline in status with the advent of industrialization and the abolition of slavery.
Life for these women, Morrissey shows, was much more hazardous, brutal, and fragmented than it was for their counterparts in the American South. These women were in a constant, dynamic struggle with men—both masters and fellow slaves—over the foundations of their social experience. This experience was defined both by their status as slaves and by gender inequality. On the one hand, their slave status gradually robbed them of their domain—the household economy—and created a kind of perverse equality in which slave women—like slave men—became “units of agricultural labor.” One the other hand, slave women were denied the access that slave men eventually gained to skilled agricultural work. The result of this gender inequality, as Morrissey convincingly demonstrates, was a further erosion of the status and authority of slave women within their own culture.
Morrissey’s study, which addresses significant issues in women's history and black history, will go far toward reshaping our perceptions of slave life in the new world.
Marietta Morrissey is professor emerita of sociology at the University of Toledo and an independent consultant on higher education. She is a former professor of sociology and dean of humanities and social sciences at Montclair State University.
