Inscribing Experience: An American Working Woman and an English Gentlewoman Encounter Jamaica's Slave Society, 1801-1805

Abstract

N r o eyewitness account of Jamaican life and society in the early nineteenth century surpasses Maria Skinner Nugent's rich and detailed journal of her four-year residence there. Her much-cited diary is a standard reference for Jamaican and Caribbean history.1 Yet despite Nugent's prominence in the historical literature of the Caribbean, women's perspectives remain scarce. This deficiency is unfortunate because AngloAmerican married women's experiences as femes covert might have produced more sympathetic responses to the plight of slaves and sharper critiques of slave-owning society than accounts authored by men. Like enslaved men and women, free married women faced violence with little or no legal recourse. They too experienced denials of independence, mobility, property ownership, control of children, access to higher education, occupational choice, and suffrage, although differing in degrees of magnitude, consequence, or