Creole Economics: Caribbean Cunning under the French Flag

Chapter 7: Women, Men, and Economic Practice: Different Routes to Autonomy and Status

don’t live on nobody eyelash so that when they wink you fall —traditional “vinegar story,” recounted by Merle Collins in “Sometimes You Have to Drink Vinegar and Pretend You Think Is Honey,” 1998 seven Women, Men, and Economic Practice different routes to autonomy and status Relations between Afro-Caribbean women and men in Martinique (and in the Caribbean generally) are notoriously complicated and have been since life on the plantation. Many women today complain regularly about men—about their laziness, their lack of responsibility, their infidelity, and their continuing assumption of authority over women. The particularities of gender relationships among people of color in Martinique bear directly on the differences in how women and men organize their economic lives. In this society, both sexes express a desire for economic autonomy, but the nature of the independence they cherish is different in kind.1 Unlike men, who talk in terms of wanting freedom to move about as they please and to be their own boss, women Women, Men, and Economic Practice 179 talk about wanting to be taken seriously as economic operators as well as a need for economic independence from men, whom they find unreliable. In addition, a woman’s drive for economic independence is tied to her concern for her children and her home. These common female priorities on family and children condition how and when women practice creole economics. In this chapter, I discuss the ways in which the shaping influences on women’s and men’s lives play out today in distinctly gendered economic identities and practices. creole histories and women’s economic independence The genesis of women’s understanding of the necessity for economic independence dates to their lives as plantation slaves. Slave women learned to rely on themselves for what they and their children needed, but at the same time, they learned that any advantages they could secure would come from their status as women in a world controlled by white European men. It is these linked historical realities for Afro-Creole women that today figure in distinguishing women’s economic lives from men’s: on the one hand, the context of creole life as slaves forced women to assume roles as primary providers for children; on the other hand, to improve this situation , women oriented themselves to European values. Because the economic pressures and opportunities for male slaves were different, their sensibilities about economic life developed differently. In the French- and British-colonized areas of the Caribbean, women were central economic actors during at least ten generations of slavery. Some scholars have suggested that the labor regimes of slavery were “gender blind” since female slaves worked alongside male slaves in the cane fields or in the plantation house.2 However, as indicated in Chapter 2, slave jobs were stratified and “higher” positions such as foreman, slave driver, carpenter, blacksmith, or wheelwright were reserved for male slaves. Recent studies by historians of slavery further demonstrate that female slaves made up the majority of unskilled “field gangs,” who were relegated to the hardest labor on the plantations.3 For work in the Great House, owners also tended to keep more female than male slaves, and more mixed-race Creoles than African-born blacks. Domestic chores practices 180 were also assigned by sex: women typically performed jobs as midwives, nursemaids, laundresses, seamstresses, housekeepers, and cooks; domestic male slaves served as butlers, valets, barbers, tailors, watchmen, and gardeners.4 From their experience in the plantation homes, female slaves learned that the best way to escape the bonds of slavery was not out of but through the Great House, despite historical evidence that these female household workers were vulnerable to the master’s sexual demands and that rape was a common occurrence. Sometimes, however, female slaves managed to leverage sexual favors in return for gifts from the master such as valued cloth, better food, opportunities to earn cash, or time off; a few became regular mistresses to their masters and some were even freed by them.5 The mulatto sons (and, less often, daughters) of these unions were generally freed by their French fathers and sent to Paris for their education.6 For more than 200 years, generations of domestic slave women used their access to the master in his domicile to improve their lot and to secure freedom for their children. For these women and, by extension, their mixed-race sons, achieving...