VCU news

By Mary Beth Alford

RICHMOND, Va. — Women slaves on French Caribbean plantations did proportionately more hard, intensive labor than male slaves, demonstrating a surprising disregard for gender in task allocation during two centuries of colonization, according to a new book on gender issues and slavery by Virginia Commonwealth University historian and professor Bernard Moitt.

The book, "Women in Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635-1848," also details ways that women resisted slavery, including armed resistance and flight. Moitt, Ph.D., an associate professor in VCU’s Department of History, found that French Caribbean women slaves often played forceful roles in the struggle against bondage and showed great courage, stamina and resilience that allowed them to prevail over adversity.

"Moitt rightly concludes that slave women were active participants in various acts of sabotage," said Edward Cox, Ph.D., associate professor and Caribbean historian at Rice University. "The scholarship in this well-written book explains that slave women had major involvement in the uprisings and undoubtedly played a role in hastening the process of emancipation in the French West Indies."

Moitt’s book took more than a decade of research in court records and official papers to capture details of the day-to-day lives of enslaved blacks in the French colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti and French Guiana from 1635 until the abolition of slavery in the French colonial empire in 1848. Complicating the research was the fact that slave women in this Caribbean region left no written accounts of their lives. The book, the first written in English about the social conditions of Caribbean slave women, fills a major gap, therefore, in Caribbean historiography. It was published recently by Indiana University Press.

Moitt, who has studied in his home country of Antigua, West Indies, as well as in Canada and the United States, has been at VCU for six years, during which he has directed a Barbados summer study abroad program. He also has published numerous articles and book chapters on francophone African and Caribbean history, with emphasis on gender and slavery.