September 21, 2017
Petticoat Rebellion? Women and Emancipation in Colonial Jamaica is Verene Shepherd’s telling of the critical role women have played in every historical and contemporary emancipatory project in the creation of the Jamaican State. She extensively describes and situates Black Jamaican women in the history of what she calls the pre-feminist and feminist eras. She notes that “one cannot speak about women in emancipation without detailing their activism and agency, which subverted and destabilized the slavery and colonial systems and eventually led to the granting of emancipation.”
The lecture is therefore a reclaiming of women’s role in activism and the unsilencing of women activists – activists during the slave trade, on the slave plantations, in post-slavery colonial Jamaica, and in contemporary Jamaica. Women were rebels, warriors, politicians, political activists, social justice activists, trade unionists, justified murderers, thieves, liars, and academics unafraid of using their bodies and clever thinking as sites of resistance, given the black woman’s bodiy was the chief site of contestation and oppression, (and continues to be). She re(presents) the black Jamaican woman as resilient, bold, wise, strategic, and facety towards their dream of ending the domination of enslavers (white men and women), and later by black men and the Jamaican state. She speaks freely about the violent access over black women’s bodies given to enslavers, and how many black Jamaican women had to live through the torture of habitual rape.
At every point in our experiences, black women were resisting oppression in what planters would call ‘Petticoat Rebellions’. But it was these everyday Petticoat Rebellions that demonstrated, in my mind, the resilience of our Black Women. Armed revolts and uprisings were few over the decades of enslaved oppression, it was the Petticoat Rebellions that would have, in a sustained manner aggravated enslavers. Verne was quick to point out that women also played a critical role in armed revolts through strategizing, marronage, and poisoning, even though in the original ‘ungendered’ telling of our history, black men were presented as the rebels in chief.
I appreciate Verene’s gendered telling of our history and the way she locates women in the resistance time and time again. She consistently reminds us that women have, and must actively participate in, lead, and support resistance movements in order to end their experiences of oppression.
One of the critical lessons I learnt from reading her lecture is that sometimes resistance must include the breaking of any law that is deemed unjust to humanity. Verene reminds us, for example, that during slavery, by law, black women were not allowed to resist the violent sexual demands of enslavers over their bodies, and would be punished if they did not acquiesce. She writes: “in addition to the abuse of their bodies through arduous physical field regime and severe whipping, enslaved women were open to sexploitation – to a far greater degree than enslaved men. Neither colonial statutes nor slave codes invested enslaved women with any rights over their own bodies, but rather, transferred and consolidated such rights within the legal person of the enslavers.”
It took the consistent breaking of such laws for black women, to even momentarily claim rights over their own bodies. The cruelty of enslavers was also vocalized by black women who were sometimes successful in having the cruelest enslavers removed from the plantation. Unfortunately, the site of the black woman’s body today, in Jamaica, is still one for contestation. There is an investment in black Jamaican women’s bodies that is controlled by systems external to us. What seems to have happened in my opinion, is that the demographics of the oppressive class has changed. Black men and the state have replaced white enslavers, but the black woman’s body is still oppressed. It is for this reason that sexual harassment legislation has been on a long journey; it’s 2017, and Jamaica still does not have an Act of Parliament that protects women from harassment, and laws that protect women from rape and other forms of sexual violence remain inadequate and dense. Further, when I look at the court system I can clearly see how it favours the perpetrators and the oppressive class of men who, data show, make up the large majority of perpetrators of sexual crimes against women and girls.
I am not sure whether it is our experiences with multiple forms of sexual violence that contributes to this, but I note that Verene’s lecture demonstrated that women as a category of people – though individual in many respects – have a different way than men of resisting oppression. On the plantation, women refused to “bear children who would themselves be enslaved”; used “dances as political meetings”, given political meetings were banned; and “fresh instance[s] of insubordination.” We are not always aggressive and front and centre, but like the petticoat under our dresses, we effect change by reshaping the society.
The degree of success is a matter for debate, given today we can still clearly see multiple examples of the oppression of black Jamaican women. Even in our history prior to the Lucille Mathurin Mair’s and the Verene Shepherd’s and the Hilary Beckles’ telling of it, women’s presence in the history and development of Jamaica was oppressed into omission and conveniently placed in realm of the invisible. Even in our political leadership today we see the ‘invisibilising’ of women. At the grassroots, women are active, effective party workers that win elections for Members of Parliament (the majority of who are men), but we have never had a critical mass of women (at least 30%) in the Jamaican parliament or cabinet. And we know that this is largely because of the multiple intersectional forms of oppression that women are forced to live through, while black Jamaican men and the state (controlled and led by men) continue to be the protagonists in the oppression of women.
This leads me to the question I have continuously asked as a read Verene’s lecture: where are the Nannys of our time to uproot the oppression of women? And perhaps to a few questions Joan French recently asked: Have women given up? Are we weary and hopeless? Is Caribbean feminism alive?Perhaps we need some Petticoat Rebels of our time who are unafraid of the angry woman, witch, demon labels cast upon rebel women by oppressors. We need women who are wiling to create a ‘new core at the periphery’ as they lead the resistance. We need, for example, for the Institute of Gender and Development Studies to resist its marginalization within the university community, to end the peripheralizing of women’s issues which, may have stared, in my opinion, when Lucille Mathurin Mair’s ‘Women and Development’ later became ‘Gender and Development’.
We should also explore how the different intersections of class, colour, and sexuality have resulted in groups and communities of women oppressing women. Some conservative feminists in the region are guilty of this. And some intersectional feminists are also guilty of this. The issue of intra feminist oppression (oppression within the movement) was not explored in the reading. However, upon reflecting on the acute success of the feminist movement, and what seems to be a dying Caribbean feminism, I wonder if some of those failings are the result of women, who at the site of multiple intersections have taken on the role of oppressor. This is something Andaiye explored in her Lucille Mathurin Mair 2002 lecture, when she critiqued the feminist movement within the region and our failure to acknowledge and engage the power relations among women . So we now have to contend with oppression from the state, oppression from black Jamaican men, and oppression from feminists who use their privilege as power over women.
Some glaring examples would be how some wealthy and middle class women oppress working class women or how some heterosexual women may oppress lesbians and bisexual women, or how some cisgender women may oppress women of trans experience.
This is a struggle that is internal to the contemporary feminist movement that was perhaps non-existent in the plantation society. While, as Verene noted, women had diverse experiences on the plantation, one thing was certain, the majority were not free and that cause, that fight, united them.
Which struggle will unite us today?
One of the lessons and critiques I would take away from Verene’s work is alignment in activism. She spoke about the need for women and men to align towards ending the domination of men over women. She writes: “There is now the need for women of the present to join with men and align themselves to a project of true emancipation; emancipation as a condition of human progress and not just as an event of 1838.” However, as we would have learnt from her and other Caribbean historians, it was the oppressed class of black women and men whose resistance led to the abolition of the slave trade and the ending of slavery. And while she acknowledges the role of some white radical women, it was the resistance from ‘below’ that led to emancipation.
My argument therefore is that while allies are important and can be useful, it is the standpoint of the oppressed class that must take on the mantle of leading the resistance to end their oppression. Black Jamaican women cannot align with their new oppressors – primarily black men and the state – as the chief strategy for empowerment. Any alignment must be subterfuge in type, in my opinion, or careful, strategic partnerships with feminist-thinking men. We must also be unafraid of leading resistance against women who abuse their power and privilege and oppress women.
It is no coincidence that for decades unemployment among women has been consistently higher than unemployment for men. It is no coincidence that while women more exponentially increase their registration into Tertiary Level Institutions than men, it is men who continue to occupy leadership of theses institutions. It is no coincidence that men make up the majority of public boards. It is no coincidence that men own and are CEOs for more private companies than women. It is certainly no coincidence that the majority of domestic workers (who are paid an undignified minimum wage) are women. This is caused largely by a status quo that facilitates the domination of men over women, and income cases the domination of women with power and privilege over women without such fortunes. But it is largely the oppression of black men over black women.
Alignment in the way that Verene is recommending is not the answer, in my opinion. ‘What about the men?’ is not the answer, because it was always about the men. Black Jamaican women therefore need to commit to creating a ‘new core at the periphery’ through multiple modes of resistance. Black Jamaican women need to tell oppressive black Jamaican men and the state to ‘go to hell’ the same way an enslaved woman – Maria told enslavers who purchased her.
We cannot align with our oppressors when they are leading the trafficking and abuse of women’s bodies as enslavers did during slavery.
Latoya Nugent 
Thoughts?