By Cecilia McAlmont
Introduction
Nearly eighteen months ago, in March 2007, Guyana and the rest of the English speaking Caribbean commemorated the Bicentennial of the Abolition of the Trade in Captured Africans. Tomorrow August 1, we will remember not only the 175th anniversary of the passing of the Emancipation Act but also the 170th anniversary of the coming of “full freedom” after four years of Apprenticeship or quasi freedom. But as we celebrate, how many of us particularly the women descended from those slaves and apprentices, are aware that the thirty one years between abolition in 1807 and the end of Apprenticeship in 1838 saw an increase in the exploitation, dehumanization and degradation of women that were characteristic of chattel slavery. In the next two articles, the paradoxical consequences (for women) of abolition and apprenticeship primarily because of their dual roles as producers and reproducers will be examined.
Women in the slave population
at Abolitionand Emancipation
In 1787, a committee was formed with the express task of “procuring and publishing such information that will tend to the Abolition of the Slave Trade.” To the West Indian planters, this was the proverbial writing on the wall and they reacted with a frenzy of slave importations. The 1790s saw the highest importation of enslaved Africans to the West Indies – 400,000 of the approximately two million that came throughout the period of the trade. Generally, because of the higher price for males in the Americas, only one female was imported for every two males. However, according to Higman, the abolition of the slave trade resulted in the gradual removal of the imbalance in the sex ratios. While this tendency varied from colony to colony, by 1817 the slave sex ratio for the British Caribbean was as a whole evenly balanced with about 101 males to 100 females. At emancipation it stood at 115 females to 100 males. Hence from 1807 to 1834, there was a trend towards female predominance.
An accepted fact of plantation economies with sugar monoculture was the existence of a pyramidal structure which rode on the backs of the largest group of slaves the praedial or field slaves. What is not so well known and emphasized, even in current scholarship, was that in many of the colonies, the majority of those praedials were in fact women. The trend towards feminization of field labour began decades before abolition. In Barbados, from as early as 1715 women outnumbered men and dominated the plantation labour gangs from then. In Jamaica, Mair showed that in 1832 sugar production consumed 49.5 percent of the slave workforce and the majority was women with a ratio of 920 men to a 1,000 women. She cites the example of the Beckford plantations where 36% of the field workers were men and 57% women. More importantly however, male field workers had other skills e.g. boiler, while men who were non field workers had a range of special skills – stone masons, blacksmiths, fishermen doctor’s assistants etc.
On the other hand, field women were exclusively field women and their other categories of work were primarily ancillary unskilled field tasks like grass cutting. Even though domestic work was mainly (primarily coloured women’s) work, Mair cites Goveia as stating that the women so employed were “favoured” rather than “skilled”. She concluded that “it was those requirements as identified by the captains of industry that dictated a conscious policy of job allocation which concentrated black enslaved women in the fields in the most menial and the least versatile areas of cultivation in excess of men, and in excess of all persons male or female who were not black.” In sum, women were excluded from the slave elite. Similar types of analyses in respect of the majority of field workers being women were done by Mary Turner for Berbice where men slightly outnumbered women and Beckles for Barbados among others.
These demographic trends and the fact that it was the “black female slave who was the least able to diversify or upgrade her economic potential,” had serious, negative implications for enslaved women in the decade and a half before emancipation and during apprenticeship.
Producers and Reproducers
The planters were always aware of the dual role of the female slaves in the plantation economy as key producers of staples from which their profits were derived and as reproducers. Their children who took their slave status could replenish their labour force to ensure the continued prosperity of their estates. However, as long as there was a vibrant trade in captive Africans which made it relatively easy to replenish their slave stock, this potential was by and large ignored since it conflicted with their primary goal of increasing productivity and profitability of their estates. However, a recognition that the future of their estates may well hinge on their exploitation of this hitherto unused potential, in addition to the frenetic purchasing of slaves after the 1780’s, some planters in Jamaica, Bar-bados, the Leeward Islands and Berbice introduced pro natalist policies. The Jamaican Consolidated Slave Act of 1792 provided that every woman with six children living should be exempted from any hard labour. In 1798, the Leeward Island Code stated that women from five months pregnant or more could only be asked to do light work. In some colonies cash payments were made to women after their children survived one month with additional ‘bonuses’ for mothers at Christmas time. More substantive were the reduction in the labour demands and punishment of female slaves. This was the recognition of the correlation between the backbreaking and time consuming task of sugar cultivation, low fertility and high infant mortality.
The abolitionists had probably hoped that after 1807 self interest would have encouraged the planters to enhance and increase measures which would help women to cope with their now equally important roles of reproduction and production. On the contrary, while the region’s population declined after 1807, in Jamaica and elsewhere the amount of sugar produced by the average plantation worker increased. This was due primarily to the fact that “the enslaved peoples were subject to increasingly intense and increasingly closely controlled regimes.” Since the majority of the plantation labourers were women, it led to the worsening of the treatment of female slaves. In a bid to extract as much labour from the enslaved while they still had almost absolute power to do so, again the short term gains from their role as producers took priority over their role as reproducers. Several of the pro natalist policies were rolled back or were now used to further influence slave women’s sexual behaviour. They were used to get them to change childbirth practices or persuade or coerce them into reducing lactation periods which planters believed suppressed fertility and hence population growth. Addition-ally, the sexual exploitation which was an integral part of slave women’s existence and which
undoubtedly made wo-men’s slavery worse than men’s continued to be used even more frequently as a mechanism of control.
The 11o’clock flog
The other area of worsening treatment for female slaves was the increased incidences of flogging even of women in advanced stages of pregnancy. Its brutality played an important role in the decision to implement amelioration proposals. The ban on the flogging of women was an important part of the proposals but colonies like Jamaica and Barbados where the Assemblies were dominant simply refused to enact the necessary legislation.
The 11 o’clock flog in Berbice where laws were implemented by Order- in- Council is a good example of the severity of the practice. According to Turner the flog was associated with task work and took place when, after the morning’s work was done and the slaves were due for their 11-1pm break it was found that less than half the task was completed. Turner’s example of pregnant Rosa’s case can serve to illustrate. In an advanced stage of pregnancy she was sent to pick coffee which she did on her knees. At 11am none of the women had completed the task work and the manager ordered that they should all be flogged. When the driver demurred at flogging the pregnant Rosa, the manager ordered, “Give it to her till the blood flies out.” Despite the recommendation of the Doctor, she was sent back to the field a third day.
She miscarried. The child was born dead “with one eye out, the arm broken and a stripe visible over the head.”
The 1826 Slave Code promulgated in the West Indian colonies, put an end to the 11o’clock flog, the flogging of women and substituted the use of stocks, handcuffs and confinement, among other measures. To back up a workplace punishment in the stocks, a treadmill was introduced in the New Amsterdam jail and women were sent there for punishment on summary conviction.
The treadmill was to be the main method of punishment for women during the apprenticeship period. That period will be the focus for the next article.
