"To BE FREE IS VERY SWEET:" RACIALISED REPRESENTATIONS OF SLAVERY... 71

in human history.s Abolition of the slave trade did not immediately bring about
an end to the institution of slavery. Throughout the Americas, slave-based
cultivation continued to drive plantation economies, but it became increasingly
evident that the institution could not long be sustained. Continued abolitionist
pressure, and, according to Eric Williams, declining profits from the colonies,
ultimately undermined slavery's economic viability (Capitalism and Slavery).
On the first of August 1838, emancipation finally came, delivering liberty to
millions of enslaved Africans in the British colonies. In the southern
slaveholding states of the North American mainland, however, nearly another
thirty years would pass before the American Civil War (1860-65) led to the end
of the legal enslavement of African-Americans throughout the United States.
 The historiography of slavery has benefited immeasurably from the
integration of gender as an analytical category, for it has illuminated both the
centrality of gender in shaping slave societies, and the importance of slavery
in shaping gender relations. As historians assert, slavery was not a gender-
neutral process, and beliefs about gender underpinned the nature of social
relations between individuals in slave societies.6 Gender impacted the lives
of every individual, whether free or unfree, white or black, male or female,
elite or poor, in profoundly different ways. Further, racialised constructions
of gender produced different understandings of womanhood for black and
white women. As Caribbean and American slave societies matured, white
women were removed from production processes and relegated to the private
sphere of the domestic household, their lives increasingly limited to the
nurture and care of husbands, children, and the management of the
household and its domestic slaves. With the loss of their productive roles,
white women's status was transformed, as the prevailing ideology
constructed a new model of passive, modest, virtuous and dependent
womanhood. Adherence to these tenets of femininity provided white women
with status and privileges denied to black women, who experienced their
gender identity in profoundly different ways. Denigrated as ugly, immodest,
animalistic, and sexually licentious, African women were excluded from
dominant models of womanhood. They were defined primarily as labourers,
and their productive and reproductive labour were fundamental components
in the reproduction of slave societies. Hence, gender identity cannot be
easily disentangled from racial identity. Understanding the complexity of
gender and racial difference illuminates more clearly the divergent
experiences of black and white women within Caribbean and southern U.S.
slave societies.7

5 For accounts of British and American abolitionist and anti-slavery movements
see Midgley (1992); Yee (1992); and Blackburn (1990).
6 See Mathurin Mair (1974); Beckles (1989); also Beckles (1998); Bush (1990);
Morrissey (1990); Fox-Genovese (1988); Gray-White (1985); and Morton (1996).
7 See Beckles (1993); Fox-Genovese's (1988); Gaspar and Hine (1996); and Bush (1981).