Slavery In Jamaica

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Slavery in the Caribbean was in some ways the same as it was in America. The slaves had similar experiences, they resisted in similar ways, and were forced to do similar types of labor. However, it was also quite different. Slavery served a different purpose and the Caribbean. The planters, slave owners, and slave/plantation managers had different agendas which caused them to treat their slaves differently. There are more cases of slave owners being nice to their slaves in America than in the Caribbean. Enslaved women in general experienced slavery in different ways than men. They had to endure binary oppression. Basically men were forced to do manual labor while women were forced to do manual labor and reproduce/perform sexual acts. When …show more content…
The suspected reasons for this vary. Many slave owners believed that the promiscuous women killed their children so they could continue to sleep around without having the responsibilities of having a child. The idea that slave women were promiscuous was a very interesting one. Marriage in Africa was very different than marriage in Europe. In Africa polygamy and polygyny were not uncommon. These acts could be seen as promiscuous to their owners. Having multiple spouses was not the social norm for them, while it was for the Africans. Many historians would argue that the women committed infanticide as a way of taking back ownership of their bodies and children. It was one of the few decisions they could make for themselves and their children. Once the child was born she could not choose where it lived, how it was raised, or anything. Her choosing to kill her own baby was a way to make sure it did not live a life in slavery. Infanticide was an expression of enslaved women’s claim to their own children. Slave women who committed infanticide resisted slaveholder hegemony by laying claim to their own children over their master’s claim. Scholars place infanticide under the heading ‘gynecological resistance’ which refers to slave women’s attempt to resist reproduction through, for example, contraception and abortion. Through infanticide, …show more content…
The most popular seems to be a chemical abortion. The women would also use herbs such as cotton plant seed, pennyroyal, cedar berries, and camphor. In his study of slave-illness Todd Savitt amenorrhea, or lack of a menstrual cycle, as an infliction suffered by enslaved women. The cessation of menses could have multiple causes such as overwork, malnutrition, tight corseting, and of course pregnancy. Among southern white women, bringing forth a delayed menses was a means of aborting pre-quickened fetuses. Perhaps some of the amenorrhea reported in this historical record reflects enslaved women’s use of unknowing physicians to achieve abortions. In the Caribbean, planters accused enslaved women of taking ‘specifics’ that induced miscarriage. Richard Sheridan in his study of health care in the colonial British West Indies recounts the report of a Jamaican doctor that midwives provided abortion services to young women. Ex-slave narratives mention a number of herbs used as medicines that are also known as menstrual regulators. Some of them were asafetida, quinine, rust of iron, cinnamon, nutmeg, juniper, and snakeroot. Gidings found references to enslaved women using camphor as a contraceptive in the 1860’s; the drug was reported to have been taken just before or after menstruation. The women preferred a chemical abortion, but sometimes they would get the same results through mechanical
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