Engendering Whiteness: White Women and Colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627-1865 (Studies in Imperialism)

__Engendering Whiteness__ draws on a wide variety of sources including property deeds, wills, court transcripts, and interrogates the ways in which white women could be simultaneously socially positioned within plantation societies as both agents and as victims. It also reveals the strategies deployed by elite and poor white women in these societies to resist their gendered subordination, to challenge the ideological and social constraints that sought to restrict their lives to the private domestic sphere, to protect the limited rights afforded to them, to secure independent livelihoods, and to create meaningful existences. A fascinating study that will be welcomed by historians of imperialism as well as scholars of gender history and women's studies. Front matter 1 Contents 6 General editor's introduction 8 Acknowledgements 10 List of abbreviations 12 Introduction 14 Mapping racial boundaries: gender, race and poor relief in Barbados 26 ‘Worse than [white] men, much worse than the negroes . . . ’: sexuality, labour and poor white women in North Carolina 57 ‘To serve her own desires’: white women and property holding in Barbadian plantation society 93 ‘There may be my sphere of usefulness . . .’: the making of a North Carolinian plantation mistress 132 White lives, black bodies: Barbadian women and slaveholding 168 ‘She Would Labor Almost Night and Day’: white women, property rights and slaveholding in North Carolina 197 Conclusion 230 Bibliography 239 Index 246 Engendering Whiteness examines the complex diversity of slaveholding and non-slaveholding white women’s material realities within the slave societies of Barbados and North Carolina between the 17th-19th centuries. -- . 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