Seeing "She" across the Sea: Reassessing Notions of Womanhood in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Plantation World

John F. Campbell

The eighteenth-century Atlantic world of commerce involved factors from England, Africa, North America, and the Caribbean and brought together not only the ideas of commerce held by these societies, but also their respective material cultures, including deep-seated ideas of gender relations. By analyzing some aspects of the gendered perception of “she” on two sides of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, the paper advances the perspective that with transference to the new sugar economy of the Atlantic, women were afforded new opportunities for de facto participation in power structures normally reserved for men. To “see” these new opportunities, the paper presents plantation society as a center of competing power claimants that offered the ideal context for women, black and white, to assert new “empowered” identities. [WP# 98006]