2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel explores the ways enslaved women in the Caribbean and Brazil addressed the daily violence of the slave system to which they were submitted. Focusing on nineteenth-century Caribbean and Brazil, the papers indicate a common pattern of violence committed against enslaved women, either by masters, overseers, and other male individuals who interacted with them in plantations and domestic environments. In the first paper, Ana Lucia Araujo examines how enslaved women coped with daily violence in domestic spaces of nineteenth-century southern Brazil, by committing infanticide. Rosanne Adderley explores the life stories of enslaved girls saved from slave ships by the British administration during the late 1820s. On the one hand, her paper shows the limits of these children’s freedom and on the other hand, how their bodies continued to be explored even in a context of anti-slavery measures. Moving to the plantation setting, Randy Browne’s paper focuses on an understudied topic: the intriguing relationships between enslaved women and high-ranking enslaved men who worked as drivers in Caribbean plantations. The three papers emphasize that enslaved women were subjected to daily violence in different areas of the Americas. Either in plantations or domestic settings, married or single, adult or children, enslaved women also responded to violence in a variety of ways. Through the study of two areas of the Americas, the panel aims to show how slavery, gender, and power operated together in the Americas during the era of the Atlantic slave trade.