Text, Testimony and Gender

Abstract

In seeking to probe the gender dimension in the history of the Caribbean since European contact, one is largely dependent on documentary evidence generated by men. Whether one relies on official records of different kinds, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence and other materials produced by private citizens, missionaries or travellers, or published accounts by residents and visitors, the sources are mostly written by men.1 There is little recorded testimony from women. This creates a methodological problem not very different from the issue which has concerned historians of the Caribbean for decades: how to approach the social history of the majority of the region’s peoples — Amerindians, Africans and East Indians, creoles of African or Indian or mixed descent — on the basis of evidence largely created by Europeans (expatriate or creole) separated from the majority by deep gulfs of ethnicity, culture (including, often, language and religion) and class. Clearly, documents generated by men will always be crucially important to the reconstruction of the history of women and gender in the Caribbean precisely because they form by far the greatest part of what has survived. But there are a few precious texts by women who recorded their experiences as residents of, or visitors to, the islands. Did these articulate and literate (often literary) women express feminine perspectives on Caribbean society?