Doing Comparative Caribbean (Gender) History: Puerto Rican and Belizean Working-Class Women, 1830s–1930s

This essay makes a case for comparative Caribbean historiography rooted in research that crosses linguistic, national, and imperial lines, through a discussion of Puerto Rican and Belizean working women from abolition to the 1930s. In illustrating the commensurability of apparently disparate cases, it challenges the paucity of historiography on intra-Caribbean comparisons as well as racialized and gendered assumptions of difference and even opposition between the Spanish and British Caribbeans. It maps out a methodology for comparing women’s experiences and actions, along with gender systems across spectrums of similarity and difference, and suggests that women’s and gender history can enrich comparative Caribbean historiography as a whole.