Gendered Testimonies: Autobiographies, Diaries and Letters by Women as Sources for Caribbean History

Abstract

Although history has been one of the main disciplines through which we can understand gender, the paucity of data written or recorded by women makes it more difficult for the historian to research women's lives in the past. In the Caribbean, this task has been made easier by the discovery of a few key sources which allow an insight into the private sphere of Caribbean women's lives. These records of women who have lived in the Caribbean since the 1800s consist of memoirs, diaries and letters. The autobiographical writings include the extraordinary record of Mary Prince, a Bermuda-born enslaved African woman. Other sources which have been examined are the diaries of women who were members of the élite in the society, and educated women who worked either in professions or through the church to assist others in their societies. Through her examination of the testimonies of these women, the author reveals aspects of childhood, motherhood, marriage and sexual abuses which different women – free and unfree, white, black or coloured – experienced. The glimpses allow us to see Caribbean women who have lived with and challenged the definitions of femininity allowed them in the past. It demonstrates that the distinctions created between women's private and public lives were as artificial then as they are at present.

Gender, Family, Race, and the Colonial State in Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaica

“…This is due at least in part to a lack of records, since the survival of materials from colonial states in the British West Indies is patchy (Brereton 1998). However, the presence in the Jamaica Archives of records from the Clergy Fund in Jamaica in the early nineteenth century offers a unique opportunity to see how, and how effectively, the colonial state in Jamaica met its ambitions (Anonymous 1841:1-9;Minter 1990:39-42, 126-29).…”

Their story: Carnival, Women, Sexuality and Sex in the Caribbean

“…Re-visioning of history is two-dimensional: there is an attempt to recover a lost identity and to address the neglect of women"s stories in the Caribbean experience. Brereton (1998)underscores the importance of reconstructing history by giving testimony to women"s lives. In so doing, historians fill what Glissant (as cited in Munro and Britton, 2012, p. 13)describes as the "opaque void of past history" by recreating (her) story.…”