CECILY JONES


greater reliance on public and private documents generated not by or for
women themselves, but by male slave-owners, travellers, and social
commentators. Reliance on these sources plantation journals, travel
accounts, vestry records, etc. offer serious methodological challenges, but
nevertheless they represent important sources of women's histories, and
are deeply revealing of the diversity of female experiences of slavery. In
what follows, I explore two women's eye-witness accounts of Caribbean
slavery and slave society during the nineteenth century. Maria Nugent's
Journal of a Residence in Jamaica (1839) describes her experiences as the
wife of George Nugent, Jamaica's Governor General, during her sojourn on
that island-colony between 1801-1805 (Wright 1966). The second narrative,
The History of Mary Prince relates the personal experiences of an enslaved
woman in Bermuda and Antigua (Ferguson 1997). Together, these texts
provide crucial insight into the nature of enslavement, but more than this,
they reveal the difficult, tense, and contradictory relations between free white
and enslaved black women facing each other across a racial divide.
 By virtue of their shared gender identity, black and white women were
both subordinated subjects of white male patriarchal authority. Whether a
female was a slave or a mistress, their reproductive capacities were
appropriated to the service of slave society, limits were placed on their social
and sexual freedoms, and they were denied political rights. Warm ties of
affection might develop between enslaved women and their mistresses, but
theirs was a divided and mutually antagonistic world, and as Hilary Beckles
has argued, many black women "..probably suffered their greatest degree of
social exploitation at the hands of white women..." (Beckles 1993: 66-82).13
Doubtless, some few mistresses recognized the parallels in the lives of white
and enslaved women, indeed, many went so far as to assert that patriarchy
made slaves of all women. Yet in the racially stratified slave societies of the
Americas where gender and race functioned as key organising principles,
their social location within the dominant white group afforded all white
women, regardless of social class, not only a privileged status, but conferred
in their hands the ability to exercise power over all enslaved persons. In the
final analysis, though united by their gender, racialised difference represented
a chasm that was too wide to bridge.
 When in July 1801, newly appointed Governor General of Jamaica, General
George Nugent, and his wife Maria arrived on the island to take up his post,
the colony was still widely regarded as one of the greatest jewels in England's
imperial Crown. The Jamaican plantocracy basked in their reputation as the
wealthiest of West Indian planters, their economic success fuelled by slave-
cultivated sugar production. The Jamaican society that the Nugent's entered
was one based on a strict racial hierarchy; the minority population of free


13 See also Bush (1981: 245-62).