Engendering Whiteness White Women and Colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627-1865

by Jones, Cecily

• ISBN13: 9780719064326
• ISBN10: 0719064325
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-04-01
• Publisher: Manchester University Press

Summary

Engendering whiteness represents a comparative analysis of the complex interweaving of race, gender, social class and sexuality in defining the contours of white women's lives in Barbados and North Carolina during the era of slavery. Despite their gendered subordination, their social location within the dominant white group afforded all white women a range of privileges. Hence, their whiteness, as much as their gender, shaped these women's social identities and material realities. Crucially, as the biological reproducers of whiteness, and hence the symbolic and literal embodiment and bearers of the state of freedom, they were critical to the maintenance and reproduction of the cultural boundaries of 'whiteness', and consequently the subjects of patriarchal measures to limit and control their social and sexual freedoms.

Author Biography

Cecily Jones is Associate Professor in Sociology and Director of the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick.

Table of Contents

General editor's introduction	p. vii
Acknowledgements	p. ix
List of abbreviations	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Mapping racial boundaries: gender, race and poor relief in Barbados	p. 13
'Worse than [white] men, much worse than the Negroes...': sexuality, labour and poor white women in North Carolina	p. 44
'To serve her own desires': white women and property holding in Barbadian plantation society	p. 80
'There may be my sphere of usefulness...': the making of a North Carolinian plantation mistress	p. 119
White lives, black bodies: Barbadian women and slaveholding	p. 155
'She Would Labor Almost Night and Day': white women, property rights and slaveholding in North Carolina	p. 184
Conclusion	p. 217
Bibliography	p. 226
Index	p. 233
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