Question

What was the sexual division of labor on Caribbean sugar plantations?

Answer 1

Gender in the Caribbean has been shaped by the region’s cultural diversity. The majority of the region’s people
today descended from enslaved Africans. Traces of African beliefs and customs, combined with European mores,
and family forms that existed under slavery, have all contributed to what it means to be a man or woman in the
Caribbean today. These mixtures have been further enriched by the heritage of indigenous Amerindian
populations and the influence of immigrants from the Middle East and Asia.
From the 16th to the middle of the 19th century African men and women were forcibly brought to the Caribbean
to work as slaves. When a sugar plantation system developed in the French colony of
Martinique and the English colony of Barbados beginning in the mid-17th century, the exploitation of enslaved
people reached a new level of precision and rigor, with particular tasks assigned by age and sex.
Boys and girls as young as four years old collected vines on plantations. By the age of eight, children began
hoeing and weeding the fields.
Certain jobs were available to either sex on plantations, while other tasks were sex specific. Adults of both sexes
labored in field gangs on sugar plantations, in the master’s house as domestic slaves, and as petty traders. Only
male slaves could hold elite, skilled positions as field commanders or as artisans. Slave women mainly worked as domestics, hucksters, petty traders, and as unskilled laborers. In French and English colonies, female slaves made
up more than half of sugar estate field hands. Slave men and women maintained small gardens on plots of
plantation land and either consumed these crops or sold their produce at weekend slave markets or to the
master. Throughout slavery, men and women participated in resistance movements and in
direct acts of rebellion against slave owners.
White men in the Caribbean frequently used female slaves as their sexual concubines. They married white
women but often had affairs with mixed race or black women. If a slave became pregnant by her master, he
would often free his mixed race child. Children were considered to be the property of their mother’s owner.
Slaves did not often have exclusive sexual relations with one person, but instead had children by different
partners. Yet, child bearing was discouraged under slavery as it reduced
the time a woman could work in the fields. Some pregnant slaves would try to abort their fetuses or commit
infanticide to avoid raising their children as slaves. If a slave woman gave birth, she might have an older female
slave look after her baby while she worked in the fields or she might simply work with her infant tied to her back
under the scorching Caribbean sun.
Some scholars argue that enslaved men’s lack of power over their families has affected male family roles in the
Caribbean today. Families existed under slavery, but ultimate power over the household rested in
the hands of slave owners. Slave mothers were the sole recognized parent; paternity was not considered to
matter unless the father of the child was the slave master.
In the British Caribbean colonies a loosening of restrictions against slave marriages at the end of the 18th century
did not increase marriage rates. In the Spanish and French Caribbean colonies, slaves were already allowed to
have church weddings and when British colonial masters instituted a similar policy, they also encouraged slaves
to have children. However no noticeable reduction in slaves having children or sexual unions outside of marriage
occurred once the ban on slave marriage was lifted.