White Landed Caribbean Women's Plantation Authority, 1630-1776

The china cabinet in the dining room at St. Nicholas’ Abbey in Speighstown, Barbados. Author Photo

This Colonial Era china cabinet from Barbados, and the portrait hanging above it, summarizes a Caribbean from centuries ago covered in plantations. The only similarity between the Caribbean now and back then is the year-round heat. A spirit of resentment plagued white, landed settlers and their descendants. People dreaded the idea of living in the Caribbean, and actually living there was a nightmare come true. Those who lived the Caribbean nightmare depended on the Americas and Europe for everything from furniture, to food, to patriarchal traditions. White landed settlers and their descendants clung onto Old World heteropatriarchal customs for dear life, as if it was their lifeline to Europe, which imposed barriers for white landed women in positions of authority on English and French Caribbean plantations.

White landed Caribbean women occupied positions of authority as landlords (or landladies). Male servants and governors found ways to poke holes in landed female authority, which undermined a landed woman’s capacity to act as a landlord (or landlady). In an exchange of letters between Governor Roger Wood of Bermuda, writing from his house in St.George’s Parish, and the Countess of Dorset, a landed woman in Bermuda. Their epistolary exchange happened in the 1630s.  The Governor threatened to deprive the countess of her indentured servants if she did not produce enough tobacco. The Countess’ indentured servants undermined her authority, prompting the governor to write, 'They should be [paying] the rent they were rated at and afterwards upon halves [as before]…they return no profits [to] your honour nor benefit themselves.’¹ If uninterrupted, landed women controlled their tenants to earn revenue, allowing them to occupy and assert positions of authority as landlords (or landladies). Uninterrupted female authority on plantations was a rarity across the English and French Caribbean. Landed men and women operated under the mentality, penned by Elizabeth Robbins, that women were, ‘Confined at the home, are so Blown Up and Corrupted, with the flattery of Servants and Tenants’.² Robbins’ The Whole Duty of a Woman is a glimpse into white Caribbean landed men’s perceptions of their female counterparts. Robbins wrote for other women, quite literally outlining the ideal woman’s life cycle through The Whole Duty of a Woman on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Consequently, landed white Caribbean men made it difficult for their female counterparts to be anything more than ornaments. Nonetheless, white landed Caribbean women persisted and found authority through inheritance,  commodification, and participation in the plantation economy.

Before I continue,  I must explain primogeniture. Primogeniture, the right of the eldest son to inherit everything, was weaponized against landed women to prevent them occupying positions of authority. Colonial Caribbean courts sought to uphold primogeniture, clinging onto a European heteropatriarchal custom for dear life. Landed women pursued legal action in the form of requisition trials to take a moonshot at challenging primogeniture in court. Surveyors got involved when land was up for grabs. These trials went on for years and often ruled against the woman’s interests. But of course, if there was a will, there was a way. To avoid years’ worth of courtroom drama, landed men cleverly wrote their wills so their wives and daughters could inherit land, slaves and the corresponding position of authority. Such strategically written wills contained clauses which reassured  men that a woman’s authority would only be temporary. A will from Bermuda’s infancy exemplified such writing, ‘it shall be lawful for the said Neptunia Downham to dispose of or give away three shares of land’.³ Listing a female beneficiary as a creditor was a loophole; the men around her would expect generosity from, ‘creditor…Widow HILTON for two shares of land [for] 100 lb Tobacco’ instead of outright authority.⁴ Allowing women to inherit land bypassed primogeniture and, in doing so, recognised their capacity to occupy and assert positions of authority on plantations. Following or challenging wills in court acknowledged, albeit reluctantly, a women’s mobility in systems of plantation patriarchy.

What remains of the Governor’s House in St.George’s Parish Bermuda. Author Photo.

White landed Caribbean women were not only under attack by primogeniture, the plantation lent itself to patriarchy. A father was not only head of the household, he was also the head of the plantation. Randy M. Browne’s books Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean (2017) and The Driver’s Story (2024) as well as Paul Cheney’s Cul De Sac (2017) attest to the ways in which patriarchy lent itself to Caribbean plantation systems. Resident and absent plantation owners relied on male subordinates to keep their plantation(s) afloat. European Caribbean colonies were vulnerable to both external and internal attacks. It is worth a reminder that not even landed individuals could escape the Caribbean’s overall dependency on Europe and the Americas. Furthermore, imbalanced demographics haunted  the English and French Caribbean. Enslaved people greatly outnumbered non-enslaved people. Men outnumbered women among landed individuals. Playing the game of cling to European heteronormative patriarchy was not conducive to a plantation economy. Landed plantation women played and rigged this game too. The rest of this article will follow on a landed white Caribbean woman’s pathway of authority on plantations from before her marriage to writing her own will.

Marriage offered a pathway for white landed Caribbean women to occupy and assert positions of authority on plantations. Marriage’s importance was imported from Europe to Caribbean colonies and being in the “Marriage state…For here as you marry the person.”⁵ Entire families were invested in their children’s marriages. Yet, a demographic imbalance between men and women made arranging marriages extremely difficult for these white landed families. Women, therefore, used their scarcity to their advantage. They could get away with having unrealistic provisions in marriage contracts because landed families were so desperate to arrange marriages for their children. Considering the pervasive debt among landed Caribbean families, requiring both spouses to be out of debt was unrealistic. Including a lack of debt in the marriage contract dried up the already shallow selection pool of potential husbands. If this selection pool was not already dried up enough, absolving (or willing to absolve) landed wives of their husbands found or future debts evaporated this shallow dry marriage pool. Women created a position of authority out of their scarcity.  Property, mainly slaves, were also up for negotiation. Future fathers-in-law would be contractually obligated to transfer slaves to his future daughter-in-law. Transferring the property simultaneously transferred the corresponding position of authority as a property owner. White landed men ceded their patriarchal authority to their female counterparts for, “it is necessary for men to multiply, it is no less than a man’s responsibility to marry.”⁶ Landed Caribbean women were positioned to assume additional authority after her marriage if she entered a joint-mastery partnership or found herself owning an entire plantation.

Joint-mastery partnerships were, simply put, business relationships between a plantation owner husband and his wife. It is impossible to figure out why exactly landed Caribbean husbands and wives entered joint-mastery partnerships. Being in a joint-mastery partnership enabled landed Caribbean women to participate in the plantation economy with the corresponding position of authority. Theoretically, these partnerships were centered on equality because husbands and wives conducted plantation business together. In practice, the true extent to which wives were fully equal in joint-mastery partnerships needs further examination. Based on existing evidence, Caribbean courts gave wives in joint-mastery partnerships a platform to assert her authority in the presence of landed men, before a male judge. Giving a joint-mastery wife the time of day in court acknowledged her position of authority. Following the trial’s proceedings, instead of creating courtroom drama, took the landed female authority as a joint-mastery wife seriously. 

Joint-mastery partnerships were not the highest level of authority a landed white Caribbean woman could hold on a plantation. Beyond joint-mastery partnerships, landed white Caribbean women held positions of immense authority as planters, a position commonly held by men. As a planter, they owned entire plantations and tracts of land. Landed white Caribbean women bought property, like “belonging to the said Mrs. Agnes Heydon, at 12s for the share of the first payment, and at 13s 14d being for 10 shares  (Using the Bank of England’s Inflation Calculator, 12s is approximately £1,208.20 and 13s 14d is approximately £1,409.57) .”⁷ Having property in a landed woman’s name was a big deal. Landed women could use their property as they pleased. They had the option to live on their property in proximity to their slaves. However, many landed women across the English and French Caribbean chose to be absentee landowners, meaning that they did not reside on or near the property. Landed Caribbean women who chose absenteeism were not immune to the duties of owning land. They were responsible for responding to the high overseer turnover. Overseers were always male, there are no cases reported of female overseers in the English and French Caribbean, and they directly managed a landed person’s land. With high overseer turnover, landed white women perpetuated a cycle of subordinating plebeian white men to work on land owned by a woman, for a woman. When an overseer was not quitting their job, they were doing their job managing property belonging to a landed female landowner. If a woman had many parcels of land, she needed more than one overseer to work for her. No matter how many overseers a landed white Caribbean woman had, their female property ownership was not hidden under a family name. Owning land in a landed woman’s name was a subtle assertion of a predominately male position of authority in a system of plantation patriarchy.

Finally, taking a page from their male counterparts, landed Caribbean women used wills and testaments to their advantage. Writing the will, during a landed Caribbean woman’s lifetime, enshrined a position of authority owning enough property to distribute it postmortem. Slaves and land were commonly bequeathed by white landed Caribbean women to surviving male and female relatives alike. One such will exemplified routine, thematic, provisions of bequeathing slaves to children and grandchildren “[has] given to my grandchild, Paul Vaughan, my … boy Robin to hold for him and his heirs so long as the … liveth.”⁸ That all said, wills and testaments could only go so far to preserve landed female authority, especially in the Caribbean where female authority was not always accepted. White landed Caribbean men could challenge a woman’s will, as did, “widow Durham, Henry Durham, made a request to have the school lands they now held at halves to be let unto them at an annual rent.”⁹ And then, a ruling on a particular challenge to the will would have largely been at the male judge’s discretion. At the end of the day, contesting it in the first place acknowledged the authority vested in a white landed Caribbean woman’s will.  

This photo is a striking example of what Caribbean plantations look like today, a haunting shell of what they used to be, outside Basseterre, Saint Kitts, Saint Kitts and Nevis. Author Photo.

To conclude, white landed Caribbean women occupied and asserted positions of authority on plantations. Despite the abundant primary source evidence arguing in favour of landed female authority on plantations in the Caribbean between 1615 and 1776, the historiography is lacking. Women appear tangentially in histories of the Caribbean. Virginia Bernhard’s 1999 book  Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda 1616-1782 broke the most ground on the topic within the past 30 years. Michael Jarvis’ 2022 book Isle of Devils, Isle of Saints is one of many that sidelines women. The article has only focused on landed white women because there has been no evidence of landed black or indigenous women in the English and French Caribbean between 1615 and 1776. Predominately absentee plantation ownership, a system where  the plantation owner does not reside on the plantation, created the assumption that there were no landed families in the Caribbean because they lived in the comfort of Britain or France. The final image exemplifies an absentee plantation. Circling back to the first and second image, there were actually white landed families in the Caribbean. There were obstacles to white landed female authority in the Caribbean between 1630 and 1776 created by a suffocating spirit of resentment. Some Old-World traditions, such as marriage and estate planning, charted paths for these women to occupy and assert positions of authority in systems of plantation patriarchy. And, if the Old-World path was closed, then a white woman’s scarcity was leveraged so she could be more than just a plantation home ornament.

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Endnotes

1. A.C. Hollis-Hatchett, Bermuda Under the Somer Isles Company vol. 3 (Pembroke: Juniper Hill & National Maritime Museum Press, 2005), 71.

2. Elizabeth Robbins, The Whole Duty of a Woman (London: J. Guiffem, 1701), 91.

3. A.C. Hollis-Hatchett, Bermuda Under the Somer Isles Company vol. 3 (Pembroke: Juniper Hill & National Maritime Museum Press, 2005), 2.

4. A.C. Hollis-Hatchett, Bermuda Under the Somer Isles Company vol. 3 (Pembroke: Juniper Hill & National Maritime Museum Press, 2005), 263. 

5. Elizabeth Robbins, The Whole Duty of a Woman (London: J. Guiffem, 1701), 65.

6. Jacques Chaussé, Traité de L’Excelence du Mariage (Paris: Chez Martin Jovenel, 1690), 131.

7. A.C. Hollis-Hatchett, Bermuda Under the Somer Isles Company vol. 3 (Pembroke: Juniper Hill & National Maritime Museum Press, 2005), 2.

8. A.C. Hollis-Hatchett, Bermuda Under the Somer Isles Company vol. 3 (Pembroke: Juniper Hill & National Maritime Museum Press, 2005), 278.

9. A.C. Hollis-Hatchett, Bermuda Under the Somer Isles Company vol. 3 (Pembroke: Juniper Hill & National Maritime Museum Press, 2005), 312.

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Bibliography

Archival Sources from the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture

Sc MG 383 

Printed Primary Sources

Chaussé, Jacques. Traité de l’excelence du Marriage (Paris 1690).

Foster, Nicholas. A Briefe Relation of the Late Horrid Rebellion Acted in the Island Barbados (London 1650).

Hollis-Hatchett, A.C., editor. Bermuda Under the Somer Islands Company, vols. 1-3 (Pembroke: Juniper Hill & National Maritime Museum Press, 2005).

Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London 1657).

Robbins, Elizabeth. The Whole Duty of a Woman (London 1701).

Secondary Sources

Bernhard, Virginia. Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda 1616-1782 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999).

Brown, Randy M. Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).

Brown, Randy M. The Driver’s Story: Labor and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).

  Cheney, Paul. Cul De Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Jones-Rogers, Stephanie. They Were Her Property, White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

Higman, B.W. Montpelier Jamaica a Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom 1739-1912 (Kingston: The Press University of the West Indies, 1998).

            O’Day, Rosemary. Agency in Early Modern Britain and the American Colonies (New York: Routledge, 2007).

            Ragatz, Lowell Joseph. The Old Plantation System in the British Caribbean. (London: The Bryan Edwards Press, 1925).