Enslaved Women in the British Caribbean: Work, Resistance and Freedom

Women acting within a system of ownership

In eighteenth century Jamaica, a free Black woman named Margaret Trusty secured the legal release of a girl called Judith Stirling Trustee. Historian David Beck Ryden, examining manumission deeds from the 1770s, considers it likely that Judith was her daughter. The relationship is a reasoned interpretation, not something the record proves outright. What the document does establish is a woman using the legal procedure for ending an individual’s enslavement. A record framed as a transfer of property can also preserve an act directed towards another person’s freedom. ¹

Women’s experiences under British Caribbean slavery cannot be contained within a single image of the mother, field worker or household servant. Women performed demanding agricultural labour, produced and traded goods, cared for others and resisted coercion. Their opportunities differed according to age, health, occupation, location and legal status. ²

The challenge is to recognise those actions while keeping their limits in view. An enslaved woman’s capacity to negotiate within an abusive system did not mean she had chosen that system, or could escape its consequences whenever she wished.

Agricultural workers in their own right

Field labour occupied a central place in enslaved women’s lives. Writing about the British West Indian sugar colonies, sociologist Cecilia Green emphasises women’s prominence in the groups undertaking the heaviest routine agricultural work. Domestic service was only one part of women’s employment. Green also identifies midwives, medical carers and women supervising groups of children. Meanwhile, men had much greater access to the more highly valued technical and craft positions. ²

That distribution affects how labour should be described. A woman digging cane holes was an agricultural worker, not simply someone accompanying men into the fields. Yet the tasks assigned to her could restrict the opportunities she had to acquire an occupation with greater standing. Slavery did not suspend all distinctions between women and men; it reorganised them to serve the extraction of labour. ²

Pregnancy did not remove compulsory work

The case of Rosa demonstrates the danger of assuming that pregnancy brought reliable protection. In 1825 she was enslaved on a coffee plantation in Berbice, in present day Guyana. According to evidence preserved in the abolition campaign and described by Royal Museums Greenwich, she requested lighter work as picking coffee became more difficult. The request was refused, and she was punished with other women for allegedly insufficient work. She subsequently delivered a stillborn child. An engraving published in 1828 publicised her case. This was evidence used to challenge slavery, rather than a neutral illustration of plantation life. ³

Rosa’s case is also a reminder that women’s experience cannot be reduced to sugar cultivation. Different crops involved different tasks, while the owner’s power to insist on labour could remain decisive. Her request for altered duties deserves attention alongside the violence that followed: she identified a need and asked for a change, but lacked the power to make that change binding. ³

Childbearing and the future workforce

From the late eighteenth century, reproductive policy became an increasingly explicit concern of Jamaican enslavers. Sasha Turner’s research on 1788 to 1807 traces changes as the campaign against the slave trade threatened their supply of new captives. At Golden Grove, Simon Taylor proposed acquiring more African women in 1789, reversing his earlier preference for more men. Owners increasingly regarded women’s pregnancies and children as a means of maintaining a future workforce. Children born to enslaved women were themselves enslaved, so a birth could be entered in an owner’s calculations as an increase in property. ⁴

Turner shows that this shift could alter work assignments, treatment and punishment. It should not be mistaken for an unconditional recognition of mothers’ needs. Decisions were still shaped by the desire to obtain labour from women while producing more labourers for the future. Policies described as improvement could therefore combine practical concessions with new scrutiny of women’s bodies. Nor does an owner’s stated intention establish what every woman actually received: policy, enforcement and individual experience need to be examined separately. ⁴

Sexual coercion and the meaning of consent

Sexual exploitation was part of the power exercised through ownership. Historian Diana Paton places this within systems of law, inheritance and racial classification, rather than treating it as a series of private scandals. Men with authority on Caribbean estates could demand sexual access from women over whom they also exercised economic and disciplinary power. Paton discusses the Jamaican evidence, including Thomas Thistlewood’s records, and the lack of effective legal protection. A description such as housekeeper or partner cannot by itself tell us whether a woman could refuse the relationship without risking punishment or loss. ⁵

Marisa Fuentes’s research on eighteenth century Bridgetown, Barbados, also examines women compelled into sexual labour. She cautions against assuming that activity outside a plantation necessarily brought independence: movement through a town could coexist with exploitation and confinement. This is why the language of choice needs precision. Women made decisions under pressure and could seek ways to improve their circumstances, but such decisions should not be used to imply consent to the conditions under which they were made. ⁶

Women could also exercise power over women

Gender did not create a single community of shared interests. Christine Walker’s study Jamaica Ladies examines free and freed women of European and African descent who owned enslaved people from the late seventeenth century onwards. Women bought, sold and punished people, and used slave ownership to pursue income and status. This history matters when considering the authority exercised inside households as well as on estates. A woman enslaver’s own restrictions within colonial society did not prevent her from exercising substantial power over an enslaved woman. ⁷

It also warns against reading legal freedom as a guarantee of solidarity. Some women used resources to free relatives or others; some profited from keeping people enslaved. Recognising these different actions makes the record more precise. The relevant questions are what a particular woman could do, whose labour supported her position, and how she used the authority available to her. ⁷

Care work continued through age and disability

Women’s labour did not end when an enslaver judged them unable to perform the heaviest field tasks. Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy’s research on the British Caribbean between 1788 and 1834 shows older and disabled women assigned to care for children, sick people and others requiring assistance. Some younger women with impairments worked as cooks for children or patients. The classifications used by owners could undervalue these workers while the plantation relied on their knowledge and effort. An entry describing someone as infirm therefore does not necessarily describe a person who had stopped working. ⁸

This care had more than one meaning. Feeding, tending or comforting another person could sustain relationships and help someone survive, while the assignment itself remained compulsory. Working among sick people could also expose carers to illness. Hunt-Kennedy stresses the need to acknowledge both care and coercion. It is possible to recognise the value of what women did for others without presenting the circumstances that forced them to do it as benevolent. ⁸

Producing goods and seeking earnings

Craft production offers another view of women’s economic activity. Mark Hauser and his colleagues studied locally made Jamaican earthenware known as yabba pottery. Their research connects these vessels with an internal economy in which enslaved and free African Jamaicans bought and sold goods. Drawing on archaeological and later ethnographic evidence, they identify women’s work and the transmission of practical knowledge as central to the pottery tradition. The method requires care: an excavated pot does not reveal its maker’s name. It does show production and exchange extending beyond the estate’s export crop. ⁹

Prince’s testimony provides a named example of earning within enslavement. In Antigua, during absences of the household that claimed her, she took in washing and sold provisions, including coffee and yams, to ship captains. She also described buying a pig aboard a vessel and reselling it on shore. Her purpose was to accumulate money towards freedom. These activities required judgement about buyers, goods and prices as well as additional labour. They were possible within particular openings in her working arrangements, rather than evidence that all enslaved women could trade on similar terms. ¹⁰

Buying freedom was possible but exceptional

Having money did not guarantee release. Prince recalled seeking assistance from prospective purchasers and supporters, only for her owner to refuse to sell her. Self purchase depended on someone else agreeing to surrender the legal claim over her. ¹⁰ Ryden’s study of Jamaican manumission deeds similarly stresses that only a small minority obtained freedom through this route. Women appear both as people released and as people arranging release, while the records disclose varied financial and family relationships. Legal manumission was a significant change in status, but it did not give free people of African descent equality within colonial society. ¹

The difference between earning and owning oneself is essential. A woman could display considerable commercial ability and still be unable to determine where she lived, for whom she worked or whether she could remain with family. A promise, a savings fund and a completed legal release were different things. Prince’s account makes that distinction explicit through repeated efforts to obtain freedom which money alone could not secure. ¹⁰

Flight and collective demands

An advertisement seeking the return of an enslaved woman named Jane is central to Fuentes’s study of Bridgetown. The description used bodily marks to make Jane recognisable to potential captors. Read from Jane’s position, it is also evidence that she had left the control of the person claiming her. The surviving advertisement does not provide a complete account of her destination, plans or subsequent life. Its purpose was recapture. Recognising that purpose prevents the owner’s description from becoming the only available interpretation of her action. ¹¹

Women also challenged labour demands together. Mimi Sheller’s research on Jamaica examines Sally Hutchinson, an apprentice at Treadways estate, who spoke for her working group about inadequate payment for extra labour. When she persisted, she was confined and then sentenced to the house of correction. Other cases concerned mothers needing time to feed children and cultivate provisions. These were arguments about working arrangements, subsistence and the right to speak. Women’s political action could emerge directly from shared responsibilities and grievances, rather than requiring a separate formal political organisation. ¹²

Keeping knowledge and making testimony

Everyday cultural work also mattered. In A Kick in the Belly, Stella Dadzie directs attention to the transmission and adaptation of knowledge through food preparation, medicines, storytelling, music, naming and burial practices. These activities helped people maintain relationships and meanings that the property system did not define for them. Such histories widen the understanding of resistance beyond famous rebellions. They do not require us to assume that every domestic action was intended as an attack on slavery, or that cultural life cancelled out the harm of coercion. ¹³

Published testimony created another means of challenge. The History of Mary Prince appeared in 1831, carrying an enslaved woman’s account to British readers. Oxford’s Faculty of English highlights both Prince’s distinctive voice and the mediation of white abolitionists in preparing and validating the text. Those circumstances should be acknowledged without treating her as merely their invention. Her account set out the difference between work undertaken for a living and labour commanded by an owner, making demands about her own future as well as exposing abuse. ¹⁴

Freedom and control over daily life

Legal abolition in 1834 was followed in much of the British Caribbean by apprenticeship, requiring continued labour for former owners. The system ended in 1838. ¹⁵ The Jamaican disputes studied by Sheller show how women contested this intermediate condition through demands over working hours, provision grounds, children and punishment. Freedom was measured against obligations that still restricted how a woman used her time. ¹²

These histories leave a concrete set of questions. Could a woman refuse a demand, keep her earnings, seek care, decide where to live or act to protect a child? A legal change could transform the answers without resolving every inequality. The records of trading, care, refusal and collective complaint show women engaging with those questions in particular circumstances. They deserve to be understood as workers and historical actors whose lives were shaped by slavery, without allowing the institution’s categories to exhaust what can be said about them.

Sources

[1] New West Indian Guide via Yale University. David Beck Ryden Manumission in Late Eighteenth Century Jamaica; 2018.

[2] Against the Current via Marxists Internet Archive. Cecilia Green Gender and Reproduction in British West Indian Slave Societies Part I; September October 1992.

[3] Royal Museums Greenwich. Rosa Ordered to be Flogged; Undated catalogue entry engraving dated 1828.

[4] Journal of Womens History author copy on Academia. Sasha Turner Home grown Slaves Women Reproduction and the Abolition of the Slave Trade Jamaica 1788 to 1807; 2011.

[5] American Historical Review via University of Warwick. Diana Paton Gender History Global History and Atlantic Slavery On Racial Capitalism and Social Reproduction; June 2022.

[6] African American Intellectual History Society. Emily Owens Enslaved Women Violence and the Archive An Interview with Marisa Fuentes; 4 October 2016.

[7] Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press. Christine Walker Jamaica Ladies Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britains Atlantic Empire Publisher description; 17 April 2020.

[8] Gender and History Wiley. Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy Had it not been for her Gender Care Labour and Disability in the British Caribbean 1788 to 1834; First published 3 December 2023 issue publication 2025.

[9] Journal of Caribbean Archaeology via Florida Museum. Mark W Hauser Christophe Descantes and Michael D Glascock Locating Enslaved Craft Production Chemical Analysis of Eighteenth Century Jamaican Pottery; 2008.

[10] Mary Prince published by F Westley and A H Davis digitised by Project Gutenberg. The History of Mary Prince A West Indian Slave Related by Herself; 1831.

[11] The Junto. Jessica Parr Questions and Answers with Marisa Fuentes Dispossessed Lives; 15 May 2017.

[12] Lancaster University Department of Sociology. Mimi Sheller Quasheba Mother Queen Black Womens Public Leadership and Political Protest in Postemancipation Jamaica; 2002 revised 5 December 2003.

[13] YES Magazine authorised excerpt from Verso. Stella Dadzie The Everyday Resistance of Enslaved Women from A Kick in the Belly Women Slavery and Resistance; 19 February 2021.

[14] University of Oxford Faculty of English. Ros Ballaster The History of Mary Prince by Mary Prince.

[15] University of New Brunswick. Introduction to Slavery Legislation Laws of Enslavement and Freedom.

Sources checked on 22 October 2026.