Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (review)

In this expertly edited volume, contributors employ gender analysis to argue that enslaved women and men underwent distinct emancipation experiences while gender inequities increased in postemancipation societies. Providing provocative case studies from the Caribbean, the southern U.S., and coastal Africa, the tightly crafted essays reveal how racial hierarchies, patriarchal authorities, and labor relations shaped the structures of slavery and the processes of abolition.

If slavery denied enslaved women’s femininity and usurped enslaved men’s masculinity, emancipation included opportunities to express desired gendered relations. Bridget Brereton describes how freed married women and mothers withdrew from fieldwork while families enrolled children in school following emancipation in the British Caribbean. Yet, as freedpeople embraced a model of respectability with the woman at home and the man working for wages, ex-slaves did not copy elite models but rejected monogamous Christian marriage. Likewise, Ileana Rodríguez-Silva shows how freedwomen employed the Liberal rhetoric of gendered family obligations to negotiate domestic benefits including a private life denied to male workers. Yet, by bargaining themselves into the category of worker and employing ideals of domesticity, freedwomen “consequently eroded their political legitimacy as workers” (207) idealized as male. Adding to the limited choices available to freed women, Martin Klein and Richard Roberts show how a mostly female enslaved population achieved freedom in French West Africa by obtaining divorces and reuniting with their families. Indeed, gendered expectations of freedpeople and ex-slaveholders shaped economic strategies before and after emancipation.

Yet, the strength of the book lies in the related arguments that the process of abolition radically reconfigured gender inequality in postemancipation societies. Sue Peabody shows how republican ex-soldiers in the French Caribbean reintegrated into society through their roles as husbands and fathers. The male warrior ideal became central to Haitian nationalism the as nineteenth century brought increased codification of separate gender spheres. Furthermore, social conservatism grew in post-slavery societies where elites and nonelites, whites and blacks, strove for a Christian heterosexual family structure that necessitated policing women’s public activities. Pamela Scully shows how emancipated men in the Cape colony (South Africa) gained citizenship and the patriarchal authority of manhood while married freedwomen lost the right to make independent contracts. Still, as Hannah Rosen indicates, discourses regarding interracial sexuality in the postemancipation battles over U.S. citizenship were part of white men’s resistance to black men’s claims to patriarchal status. Embedded in liberal ideals of freedom were imposed domestic roles for women with male head of household as Roger A. Kittleson and Carol Faulkner demonstrate how abolitionists mobilized representations of virtuous and moral femininity to present white women as the rescuers of slaves and the caretakers of former slaves. Freedom, therefore, was intertwined with new articulations of dependence.

Most compellingly, the essays illustrate how race and gender were simultaneous factors. Mimi Sheller demonstrates that in Jamaica, freedmen reconstructed masculinity along with blackness to exclude freedwomen and indentured Chinese laborers from claims to citizenship. Even as Afro-Jamaican men employed Christian discourse of a patriarchal family to include themselves into British discourse of “active masculine citizenship” (82), they developed a working-class masculinity in contrast to “both parasitical white upper-class masculinity and dependent indentured masculinity” (91). Likewise, Sheena Boa shows how poor women seized street activities to subvert codes of “proper” femininity in urban St. Vincent and mock authority figures who attempt to regain public spaces by deriding poor women for inability to achieve European gender standards of propriety. Recognizing the hegemony of British moral codes, Melanie Newton argues that elite nonwhite men asserted themselves as public leaders through philanthropy that required “domestication” (226) of women’s activities in order to counteract white representations of free women as sexually transgressive. Further tangling race with gender, Marek Steedman employs a complex case of white violence against a black couple in postemancipation Louisiana to demonstrate how “southern white men perceived a threat to their own social standing in the ability of freedpeople...