"Greater Numbers of Fair and Lovely Women": White Women and the Barbadian Demographic Crisis, 1673–1715

Abstract

In Sugar and Slaves, Richard Dunn used the 1680 census of Barbados to depict the island as a place where stunted population growth and brittle bonds of community plagued the island's white settler society. Dunn attributed Barbados's demographic disruption to low marriage and nuptiality rates. However, by reexamining population reports from Barbados between 1673 and 1715, "Greater Numbers of Fair and Lovely Women" reveals that low nuptiality and birth rates were symptoms of a greater problem: Barbados was hemorrhaging white men. Between 1673 and 1715, the number of white women and children on Barbados remained stable, while more than four thousand men drained from the colony. This new demographic analysis of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Barbados explores how white women came to form the foundation of their communities as white men left the island to seek new opportunities. Despite Barbados's reputation as a masculine and exploitative space largely bereft of the "civilizing" influence of white women and families, by the turn of the eighteenth century, the preservation of Barbados's settler society had fallen almost entirely to white women.