Gender and the Reproductive Labor of Settlement: Where are the Women in Settler Colonial Theory?

In the last decade, histories of Anglophone colonies such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States have increasingly framed them as “settler colonies,” places in which Europeans invaded with the intent to create permanent non-native communities. In spite of the contributions of feminist scholars such as Ann Stoler and Margaret Jacobs, several recent syntheses of settler colonial history take the reproduction of white settler families for granted, and fail to incorporate meaningful analysis of gender, women, or sexuality.

In hopes of suggesting how settler societies in particular cannot be explained without attending to gender (both masculinity and femininity) and sexuality (especially the policing of racial lines and reproduction of communities), this paper links white women and settler colonialism in early U.S. Florida to Indian Removal and slavery. Using QGis, Shire maps white settlements that displaced Seminole people in two Florida regions in the 1840s, revealing how white homesteaders in extended kin groups (that included large numbers of white women) moved into long-established Seminole towns and farms, bringing large numbers of enslaved blacks with them. Using land records and census data she links settler colonialism and white women’s domestic and reproductive labor directly to Indian Removal and the expansion of slavery in Florida, overturning the old narrative of the “hardy” male settler who tamed the wilderness alone. She also discusses the importance of Seminole women’s reproductive and productive labor as the progenitors of their clans and, therefore, their people’s resistance and survival.