The impact of abolition and apprenticeship on female slaves and apprentices

(Part 2)

Introduction
In the previous article, the paradoxical consequences for women of the abolition act of 1807 were examined. It was demonstrated that for most women who by then constituted the majority of field workers in many of the colonies, the implementation of the abolition act let to the worsening of their treatment because of their dual and often conflicting roles as producers and reproducers. In this article, the focus will be on the ways in which the implementation of apprenticeship led to the further intensification of the conflict between women’s dual roles and as a consequence even worse treatment than in the years just prior to the passing of the emancipation act.

The emancipation act
and the rationale for
apprenticeship

In addition to the freeing of all children under the age of six, the emancipation act mandated a period of apprenticeship to gradually phase out slavery. The apprentices were required to give 45 – in some colonies 40 and a half – unpaid hours a week to the plantation owners. The rest of their time they could continue to work for wages on the same estates or “barter on the wage market” The apprentices were entitled to one day a week usually Sunday free. Apprentices were also permitted to buy their freedom under specific conditions.

Praedials were supposed to serve six years and non praedials four. It is important to note that important aspects of the apprentices’ welfare like work behaviour, task rates, punishment regimes came under the purview of the planter dominated local legislatures. This was to prove disastrous especially for female apprentices.

Ostensibly, the rationale behind apprenticeship was to allow for a transition period during which the planters would continue to have a continuous labour supply while adjusting to the demands of free labour while the apprentices would learn to work for wages and adjust to a free society. However, the way in which the system evolved led Ifill to conclude that “the foremost intention underlying the apprenticeship system was to extract forced labour for the plantations in order to maintain or increase productivity within the context of an inequitable and exploitative social structure that was facing strong challenges” as it made provisions for “labour control by way of physical coercion as against the economic coercion of the market”.

The ever worsening treatment of the women who made up the majority of the field workers on whom the maintenance or the increase of productivity on the estates depended amply illustrates the above contentions.

Producers versus
reproducers and their
punishments

Abolition had signalled to the planters that it was only a matter of time before the system of chattel slavery would come to an end. Their reaction had been the opposite of what the abolitionists had hoped. Instead of improving the treatment of their female slaves whose dual role of producers and reproducers was now more clearly underscored their brutality increased and in particular the pronatalist policies which had brought some relief to pregnant slaves started to be rolled back.

The apprenticeship set a definite date as to when slavery would end and the planters according to Mair, used it to retain maximum control over what they saw as a dwindling labour force because they were seeing withdrawals of female apprentices from the cane fields. During the period therefore women became even more conspicuous targets of planter hostility primarily according to Pantin “pronatalist policies produced an important zone of conflict between planters and enslaved women.”

Many planters now tried to force women who had previously been entitled to light work into the cane fields.

More specifically, according to Mair, mothers with over six children found their pre-emancipation right to work exemption reversed and they were even sent back to the fields. Additionally, women in advanced stages of pregnancy who were also previously exempted from work were now called upon to work in the field. The services for field workers which were provided by cooks, water carriers, midwives and nurses were often withdrawn and the women providing such services re-deployed to the field gangs. Younger women apprentices came into conflict with the planters over the lack of sufficient time to breast feed and take care of their children. On a Jamaican plantation, Nancy Cowan was charged with ‘insolence, general bad conduct, and refusing to wean her child the same being 29 months old’, while Jessy Ann Tharp was punished for taking time off to breast-feed her 19 month old child and refusing to wean the infant. Their punishment was to be locked in the plantation cells for fourteen days.

Ifill has also asserted that “the apprentice sought to create willing labourers by physical coercion, punishment and social and economic control. The planters used their right to determine the specifics of the emancipation act to  achieve these goals. It was demonstrated that field women were exclusively field women and lacked the range of special skills available to men so few had earned any money in the latter years of slavery when this was possible. However, “the priority which the macro-economic system placed on cash crops for export, to the exclusion of food crops for local consumption, resulted in slaves (especially female slaves) having to assume responsibility to feed themselves” and their families.

This entrepreneurship of female apprentices now threatened to fulfill the planters’ excessive fear of a labour shortage. Laws were put in place to sabotage the process. Some planters in Jamaica only allowed apprentices to plant specific crops on their provision grounds. It was also ordered that no additional help could be used to cultivate the plots, they could not use brothers or sisters or any other person to help them.

This directive particularly targeted women who pooled their land and labour in a family enterprise to lighten the work. In British Guiana, even though the apprentices preferred to work five nine hour days they were often asked to work six seven hour days. Many planters enforced the rest day, Sunday “as a day of uninterrupted rest” from any work including tending provision grounds. These actions ensured that the bulk of their workers would not be distracted from the task of sugar cultivation and would never earn the money to purchase their freedom.

According to Mair, “women provoked such spiteful measures from the establishment, not only because they could divert their time and energy to their own purposes and could so undermine the estates’ labour power; in addition they could withhold their children’s labour.” Under the abolition act children under six years were to be free  and could only be apprenticed after six with the consent of their mothers. Mair posited that the planters never lost sight of young black men as potential workers but they would have to get past the mothers.

Jamaican women were singled out for their opposition to the notion of their sons’ apprenticeship and were known to say that they would prefer to see them die than become apprentices. She stated that of the 39,013 slave children who were under six on August 1, 1834, only nine were released by their mothers during the four years of apprenticeship. A similar story is told about Barbadian women. Little land was available for any provision grounds and women were dependent on supplies from the estates to feed their children. Food was withheld as a means of coercing the women to apprentice their sons but they declared they would prefer them to die of starvation than have them apprenticed. Eventually the Assem-bly was forced to legislate in favour of the women on the matter.

There is ample evidence to suggest that women received extra and often more severe punishments for minor work infractions in retaliation for their decisions to take time of to stay away from the fields to breastfeed and take of sick children and/or to refuse to apprentice their sons to the estates. Even though flogging was no longer possible women were subjected to double and more doses of the substitutes for whipping – confinement in the public stocks, handcuffs and the treadmill. The stocks are described as a wooden bed at the foot of which was a board with circular holes, which open to admit the feet. The feet are fastened and padlocked. Imagine a woman in the later stages of pregnancy so confined.

The treadmill was the mode of punishment much preferred by planters especially in Berbice. Now a popular exercise machine “the severity of the punishment depended in part on how the machine was regulated in terms of weight and speed.” According to Turner, one disobedient female slave complained of feeling weak after eight days on the treadmill.
Both of these methods of punishment used primarily on women who were regarded as being disobedient, refusal to work or failure to complete became “an instrument of brutal torture” and often led to miscarriages. Additionally, the planters in British Guiana carried out many illegal floggings. Turner concluded that “the ferocity of the methods available to induce labour discipline was not substantially changed by the removal of the whip.”

Despite its being weighted firmly on the side of the planters, apprenticeship did not achieve its goals and was halted two years early.