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Gender


Gender, Slavery and Abolition in Comparative Atlantic Perspective


tutor: Camillia Cowling (c.cowling@warwick.ac.uk)



Questions

What is “gender” and in what ways have historians used it as a tool of analysis?

How can a “gender perspective” change our view of the comparative development, features, and ending of slavery in the Americas and the broader Atlantic World?

What problems have been encountered by historians who want to incorporate gender into their research?

Key Readings

Camillia Cowling, “Debating Womanhood, Defining Freedom: The Abolition of Slavery in Rio de Janeiro,” Gender & History, 22:2 (August 2010): 284-301.

Jennifer L. Morgan, Labouring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004; especially “Introduction,” pp. 1-11, and chapter 3, pp. 69-106.

Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” The American Historical Review, 91: 5 (December 1986): 1053-1075.

Diana Paton, “Gender, Language, Violence and Slavery: Insult in Jamaica, 1800-1838,” Gender & History, 18:2 (August 2006): 246-265.


Further Readings

Beckles, Hilary. Centering Woman: Gender Relations in Caribbean Society. Kingston: Ian Randle, 1999. Especially “Introduction.”

Sarah L. Franklin, Women and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Cuba, especially “Introduction”

Jennifer L. Morgan, Labouring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004; especially “Introduction,” pp. 1-11, and chapter 3, pp. 69-106.

Kristin Hoganson. “Garrisonian Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Gender, 1850-1860.” American Quarterly, 45:4 (December 1993): 558-95.

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, “ ‘Spanish’ Cuba: Race and Class in Spanish and Cuban Antislavery Ideology, 1861-1868.” Cuban Studies/ Estudios Cubanos, 25 (1997): 101-122.

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011), particularly chapter 4, “The Resurgence and Destruction of Slavery in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Brazil,” pp. 120-155 [this is not specifically “about” gender, but provides an approachable introduction to the resurgence and eventual destruction of slavery in Latin America in the nineteenth century]

Pamela Scully and Diana Paton (eds.), Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World. Particularly Diana Paton and Pamela Scully, “Introduction: Gender and Slave Emancipation in Comparative Perspective,” pp. 1-34 (although the whole volume is useful)