Contenu du sommaire : Le genre dans les mondes caribéens

‪The free woman of colour was a dynamic economic and social presence in the colonial societies of the Caribbean. ‪‪Studying such women illustrates their place in society, and the possibility of their agency. The analysis of donations registered between 1806 and 1830 in the Land Transactions collection in Martinique makes it possible to provide an unexpected profile of these free women of colour, and to observe the richness and specificity of their social interaction, at a time when their group was experiencing significant demographic and economic growth. This article demonstrates that their particular status encouraged these women to organize, in order to ensure the transmission of property within the family, despite the absence of legitimate matrimony, and indicates the way they took into consideration enslaved members of the family. Finally it also highlights how these women developed particular female forms of solidarity‪

‪This article analyses the earliest examples of wills, deeds and related notarial documents by which women who had originally been enslaved and then freed were deeded land and material possessions, in late seventeenth- and earl eighteenth-century Barbados. ‪Since this period was marked by the development of Barbadian slave society and by the growth of the community of free men and women of colour, these documents provide insights into relationships established with enslavers and the colonial administration. One such series of documents relates to “Free Jenny” or Jane Hallett c.1690s-1740s who resided in the area known as “The Cameroons” (now likely near Brighton, St Michael) as well as to Sarah Hallett who resided at nearby Halletts in St Michael. It reveals how land passed between the white male landed elite and their white and non-white families. An examination of their experiences through available documentary records demonstrates how tenuous such land bequests were. But these documents also transmit the voices of both free and enslaved women through time.

‪The essay explores a notarial record authorized by a woman named Catalina de los Santos in Garachico (Tenerife) in ‪1593. She identifies herself as a ‪mulata‪, a widow, a ‪vecina‪ (long-term resident, head of household, property-owner) of Santo Domingo on the island of Española, and the owner [‪señora‪] of the ship on which she was traveling. She had been in Seville, where she dealt with various merchants and purchased a blank travel license. During her return voyage, she stopped off in Garachico and stayed in the house of a merchant who also provided accommodation for her “servants and slaves.” She signs her name at the end. Although they distinguish her from the vast majority of Africans and people of African descent in the region during the late sixteenth century, Catalina de los Santos's social status and commercial activities oblige us to envision a broad range of possibilities for women of African descent in Spanish Caribbean seaports.‪

‪During the eighteenth century, Saint-Domingue (later Haiti), the wealthy French Caribbean colony, was obsessed with fear of poisoning. ‪Marie Kingué was an enslaved healer who practised her activity among both slaves and white settlers, associating her cures with witchcraft and divination. Her exceptional moral authority within local society subverted racial barriers as well as the gender hierarchy. For example, she was called upon to identify poisoners, whereupon their masters subjected them to torture, on the basis of her accusations. ‪An anonymous report compiled in 1785 testifies to the anxiety her actions generated among the colony's judicial authorities. ‪This document, which was prepared in order to justify taking legal action against Marie Kingué, also reveals the difficulty of arresting her, on account of the support she received from the white elite.

‪Mathilda Percival, a free woman of color, sailed away from the tiny Dutch-controlled island of St Eustatius some time between late 1859 and early 1860. ‪She was headed for a new life on the Danish island of St Thomas. This article is based on seven surviving letters to her husband. Mathilda's letters shed light on the lives and challenges of female migrant laborers in the mid-nineteenth century Caribbean. They show that her experiences have much in common with those of contemporary female domestic migrant workers, for whom migration offers an opportunity to experience a sense of autonomy and empowerment. The texts show that although Mathilda almost certainly went to St Thomas primarily for economic reasons, her motives for remaining were probably far more complex. Her work seems to have given her satisfaction, and as anthropologist James Clifford has recognized, women “may refuse the option of return when it presents itself, especially when the terms are dictated by men” as was the case for Mathilda. Moreover, while the dominant historiography of Caribbean female migration focuses on the twentieth century (beginning after the completion of the Panama Canal and accelerating post-1960) we know very little about the post-emancipation migration of women in the mid-nineteenth century. We know even less about the chronically understudied non-British Caribbean in this respect – a lacuna the letters explicated in this article will address.

‪The two documents we present here stem from the personnel records of a primary school teacher from Guadeloupe (1957-1962) and from her correspondence with her husband (1961-1962). These documents highlight the racism black women from the French overseas territories (DOM-TOM) might face when they migrated to metropolitan France in the 1950s and ‪‪1960s, especially in two contexts: at the workplace when in contact with the general public, and within mixed couples. Our commentary underlines the complexity of the processes of racialization and calls for more research on the trajectories of the men and women who migrated from the overseas territories to mainland France, in particular with reference to their integration in the workplace.‪

‪Despite the paucity of primary sources, the historiography on women and gender in societies with slaves of the English and French Caribbean has been expanding ‪‪since the 1970s, although research on the French Antilles is less plentiful than its counterpart relating to the British West Indies. ‪After a general presentation of Caribbean studies, the article analyses studies dealing with enslaved women, which have dominated the field for some time, then examines those on free women of colour and white women as well as on masculinities.

‪In 1974, Lucille Mathurin Mair completed her doctoral thesis at the Jamaica ‪campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI). In 2006, it was published for the first time under the title ‪ ‪A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica, 1655-1844‪; it was the first full-length work on Caribbean women's historical experience. In 1993, Verene Shepherd organized a symposium, also at the Jamaica campus of UWI, out of which emerged the collection of essays, Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective‪, published in 1995. These two events symbolized the development, from the early 1970s onwards, of a significant body of work on women and gender in the history of the English-speaking Caribbean; research and publication in the field have grown considerably between the mid-1990s and the present. These studies have been largely based on both administrative and private archives, but at the same time historians have innovated in engaging in oral history, drawing on the oral tradition of the Caribbean.‪

‪Elite matrimonial strategies of the past led to the migration of individuals of both sexes, not only the spouse who was being sent away to marry a selected bride or groom, but also that of various conditions of people from different social milieus who accompanied the traveller. These migrations did not have the same impact on men and women, even if they display some aspects in common. Hence the need to analyse them carefully by placing gender at the centre of the ‪‪approach. This article considers examples from the Frankish kingdom of the Early Middle Ages, considering both the way such strategies were devised and realized and how they worked out in practice, for the identity and integration of the individuals concerned.‪