Mapping Racial Boundaries: Gender, Race, and Poor Relief in Barbadian Plantation Society

This article explores problems the intersections of race, gender, and class created in the construction of the identities and material realities of white women in Barbados during the era of plantation slavery. Of the diverse racial groups that settled in the plantation societies, white women represent one of the most invisible and least analyzed. Their experiences have attracted minimal attention from Caribbean scholars, yet historical records reveal that white women played significant socioeconomic and political roles. As reproducers of the human state of freedom, their sexuality posed a potential threat to white dominance, and there is some evidence that their social and sexual autonomies were constrained and regulated. This article analyzes the dispensation of poor relief as a strategy the patriarchal white ruling class utilized to maintain the boundaries of "whiteness" by incorporating impoverished white women into a sphere of white superiority.