Quasheba, mother, queen: Black women's public leadership and political protest in post‐emancipation Jamaica, 1834–65 (original) (raw)

1998, Slavery & Abolition

Recent reassessments of Caribbean women's political roles both during and after slavery suggest that their leadership was crucial to popular collective action throughout the Americas. Many historians, like Jean Besson, have come to see women as 'central to the Afro-Caribbean peasant cultures of resistance, rooted in the tradition of slave resistance, which emerged in response to colonialism and the plantation system'. For the period of slavery, there has been increasing interest in women's contributions to slave resistance, including both violent opposition and what James Scott calls 'everyday forms of resistance'; for the post-emancipation period, attention has turned to women's participation in labor protest, as well as in more diffuse community organization and cultural resistance.(1) Above all, the most recent comparative syntheses in the field demonstrate that 'despite the sexism and racism which initially denied black and coloured women the legal right to vote, the lack of the franchise did not exclude women from active participation in the public world of politics during slavery and in the post-slavery Caribbean'. Like disfranchised people elsewhere, Afro-Caribbean women turned everyday activities into sites of resistance, ordinary space into theatres for collective action.(2) In the case of Jamaica, one is confronted head-on with the unexpected but crucial participation of women not only in behind-the-scenes cultural resistance, but in public activities such as collective labor protest, petitioning, demonstration, and riot. This article