Women In Slavery

One of the more controversial topics in the modern study of Islam, concerns the relative status of women and the treatment and civil rights of non-Islamic minorities within the context of Islamic law.  This qualitative research project will look at a very narrow topic within Islamic law which addresses both issues.  The aim of the research is to bring to light Muhammad’s teaching and practice on this subject through reading and analysis of primary source document references to al ‘azl and its rejection in the proper treatment of non-Muslim captive women.  If religious law (Sharia) is to change in the modern context, it must surely begin with the more problematical pronouncements found in the foundational texts of Islam.  The purpose of this study is to illustrate one such practice while attempting to answer the question, how is this aspect of the Prophet’s behavior (Sunnah) to be interpreted in the modern age?  My hope is that this study will benefit liberal Muslims who seek to reform Islam for the 21st century context.  It is not my purpose to offend any Muslim readers by this project, but to illustrate that all religions must find a way to deal with their darker texts in a globalized world where universal human rights across cultural and religious barriers will become the  most important issue of the 21st century.

Resumo: Na Martinica, principal colônia francesa no Caribe, depois de São Domingos/Haiti, na primeira metade do século XIX, as mulheres afrodescendentes estavam em maior número nas lavouras, há indícios de que elas que cultivavam as roças de víveres — cuja produção era a segunda em maior quantidade de terras e de escravos, depois da cana-de-açúcar —, trabalhavam como costureiras, lavadeiras, domésticas, marchandes, eram essenciais às suas famílias, atuavam como lideranças em suas festas e rituais. Contudo, em todo o Caribe Francês, ao tratar da questão da alforria, várias fontes produzidas entre os séculos XVIII e XIX exprimiram um esteriótipo segundo o qual a maioria das liberdades concedidas nas colônias foram acordadas às mulheres escravizadas que eram “concubinas dos brancos” e aos filhos dessas relações. E alguns historiadores que abordam esta questão reafirmam essa mesma conclusão. Porém, nenhum estudo demonstrou de fato a expressividade dessa situação, a não ser a aparente reprodução do discurso da elite de colonos brancos. Este é o problema central que orienta este trabalho de pesquisa ao buscar compreender os processos de conquista da alforria nos últimos anos de escravidão nas Antilhas Francesas, analisando sobretudo as experiências vivenciadas pelas mulheres escravizadas e em vias de liberdade na Martinica. Durante a Monarquia de Julho (1830-1848), a conquista da alforria no Caribe Francês tornou-se muito significativa devido às transformações políticas e jurídicas na França metropolitana e nas colônias e, ainda, à percepção das pessoas escravizadas e libertas sobre estas mudanças. Diferentemente de qualquer período anterior, uma grande quantidade de cartas de alforria oficiais foram emitidas pela administração colonial. Assim, ao analisar esses processos de conquista da liberdade, a expressão demográfica desse fenômeno, a legislação e debates políticos em torno da alforria e as tensões entre “brancos” e “livres de cor” nas colônias francesas e na metrópole acerca de direitos e emancipação, meu objetivo foi buscar os indícios do quanto as mulheres afrodescendentes foram protagonistas das estratégias e projetos de liberdade, individuais e coletivos. Essas análises foram realizadas a partir de uma vasta documentação, que inclui relatos de viajantes, textos de abolicionistas e de senhores de escravos, textos legislativos, correspondências e relatórios de autoridades coloniais e metropolitanas, documentação notarial, periódicos oficiais e registros do estado civil da Martinica, fontes pesquisadas sobretudo nos Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer e na Biblioteca Nacional da França. Assim, foram analisados os processos históricos que envolveram a conquista da liberdade, mesmo que precária, por homens e mulheres, pensando a “alforria” nas sociedades escravistas como uma questão essencial para se analisar a história da escravidão nas Américas e no Caribe. Nestes contextos, observo sobretudo as histórias das mulheres afrodescendentes na Martinica, abordando questões em torno de classe, raça e gênero, sob a perspectiva da história social. Dessa forma, foi possível ressaltar suas experiências e de suas famílias e demonstrar a fragilidade do argumento o qual afirma que seu acesso à alforria ocorreu predominantemente por meio de suas relações afetivas (e desiguais) com os homens brancos, como se esse fosse o principal meio pelo qual as mulheres negras pudessem construir seus caminhos para a liberdade.

Abstract: In Martinique, the main French colony in the Caribbean after Saint-Domingue / Haiti, in the first half of the 19th century, Afro-descendant women were in greater numbers in the plantations, there are indications that they were cultivating food crops — in which the production was the second largest in quantities of land and of slaves, after sugar cane —, worked as seamstresses, washerwomen, domestic workers, marchandes, were essential to their families and acted as leaders in their celebrations and rituals. Nevertheless, throughout the French Caribbean, when dealing with the issue of manumission, various sources produced between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries expressed a stereotype according to which most of the freedoms granted in the colonies were accorded to enslaved women who were “concubines of white men” and to the children of these relationships. And some historians who approach the question reaffirm this same conclusion. However, no study has actually demonstrated the expressiveness of this situation, other than the apparent reproduction of the elite white colons' discourse. This is the central problem that guides this research work in seeking to understand the processes of conquest of manumission in the last years of slavery in the French Antilles, analyzing above all the experiences lived by women either enslaved and in the process of freedom in Martinique. During the July Monarchy (1830-1848), the conquest of manumission in the French Caribbean became very significant due to the political and legal transformations in metropolitan France and in its colonies, and also to the perception of the enslaved and freed people about these changes. Unlike any previous period, a large number of official manumission papers were issued by the colonial administration. Therefore, in analyzing these processes of conquering freedom, the demographic expression of this phenomenon, the legislation and political debates surrounding the manumission and the tensions between “white” and “free colored” people in the French colonies and in the metropolis about rights and emancipation, my objective was to seek the indications of how Afro-descendant women were protagonists of individual and collective strategies and projects of freedom. These analyses were carried out on the basis of extensive documentation, including travelers' accounts, abolitionist and slave-master texts, legislative texts, correspondences and reports from colonial and metropolitan authorities, notary documentation, official periodicals, and civil status records from Martinique, sources researched mainly in the Archives Nationales d'Outre Mer and in the National Library of France. Thus, historical contexts were analyzed that involved the conquest of freedom, even if precarious, by men and women, thinking of “manumission” in slave societies as an essential question to analyze the history of slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean. In these contexts, I particularly look at the stories of Afro-descendant women in Martinique, approaching issues around class, race, and gender, from the perspective of social history. In this way, it was possible to emphasize their experiences and those of their families and to demonstrate the fragility of the argument which asserts that their access to manumission occurred predominantly through their affective (and unequal) relations with the white men, as if it were the main means by which black women could build their paths to freedom.

Bu çalışmada Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nun kadın köleleri, Harem-i Hümayun ve reaya özelinde karşılaştırmalı bir bakış açısıyla değerlendirilmeye çalışılmıştır. Çalışmanın amacını 16.-18. yüzyıllarda Osmanlı coğrafyasındaki kadın kölelerin hayatlarını anlama çabası oluşturmuştur. Bu çalışmada yapılmak istenen, sultanın ve reayanın kadın kölelerinin hayatlarının muhtelif alanlarında ne gibi zorluklar veya kolaylıklar yaşadığını okuyucuya sunmaktır.

In this study, Ottoman Empire's female slaves were evaluated with a comparative perspective in Harem-i Humayun and reaya specific. The aim of the study is composed of trying to understand the lives of female slaves who were in Ottoman from 16 th to 18 th centuries. The aim of this study is to present what kind of difficulties and easiness sultan and reaya slaves experience in their lives to the reader.

Publicado por la Editorial Abya-Yala y la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Quito (c. 1996), este libro recoge los resultados de la tesis de pregrado que la autora presentó para obtener su título de Licenciada en Ciencias Históricas. El tema, pionero en el momento en el que fue publicado, estudia la estrategia que una mujer esclava en el siglo XVIII, pone en acción en los tribunales de una ciudad portuaria del imperio español, Guayaquil, para obtener su libertad.  Este texto hace un análisis de la estructura retórica de los argumentos judiciales para descubrir los intersticios en los que el discurso permitió a la mujer esclava construir su identidad de libre como verosímil. Apelando a los enunciados de Roland Barthes sobre la estructura del discurso y la Retórica Clásica, y a las enseñanzas de Michel Foucault sobre la enunciación como una función, la autora logra mostrar que la identidad de los individuos sujetos a esclavitud podían transformarse en los márgenes del discurso.

Hasta ahora la historiografía había supuesto que nunca se sabrían los motivos del enfrentamiento entre los cimarrones que fundaron el pueblo libre de Santa María de Amapa, en México, en 1769. Nuevas fuentes de archivo nos han revelado lo sucedido, así como el protagonismo que tuvieron los esclavos procedentes de la gran rebelión y fuga de 1735 en Córdoba. Estos acontecimientos amplían nuestra visión sobre la capacidad negociadora de los esclavos cimarrones con las autoridades coloniales. La traición a sus compañeros del palenque, a quienes entregaron a las autoridades de Córdoba, les permitió obtener el perdón del virrey (1762) y formar dicho pueblo.

Historiography has thus far assumed that we would never understand the reasons for the confrontations of the maroon slaves that founded the free town of Santa María de Amapa, Mexico, in 1769. Previously unexamined archival sources reveal what happened and demonstrate the agency of the slaves dating back to their great rebellion and escape in Cordoba in 1735. These events provide us with new insights into the negotiating abilities of the maroon slaves with the colonial authorities. By betraying some of their own companions in their palenque to the authorities in Cordoba, they obtained the viceroy’s pardon in 1762 and established their town.

The "Attic stelai" record slaves confiscated from condemned Athenians and metics.  The slaves listed turn out to be overwhelmingly male, which tneds to confirm the impression from literary evidence that most slaves in Athens were male.  But the wives of the condemned are likely to have returned to their paternal homes and to have taken their personal slaves, mainly female, with them.  Thus, a skim of female slaves may have taken place before the confiscation and the lists may include a higher proportion of males than were in the households originally.  Alas, it is not possible to estimate whether this effect could have been large enough to undermine the impression that men outnumbered women among these slaves.

Building on the suggestion by the editors of the Routledge Companion to World Literature (2011) to re-frame the fi eld of literary studies from a global and transnational perspective, this article suggests a new approach to the concept of ‘contact literature’. Reading American literature as ‘contact literature’ assumes that even if an American literary text is written in English, the other languages of the ‘contact zone’ in which the text originated and/or to which it alludes also impacted the writing process and therefore need to be included in the analysis. This new approach to the analysis of American literature is applied here to Sojourner Truth’s famous slave narrative, published in 1850. Since Truth spent the first 30 years of her life as a slave in a
predominantly Dutch-speaking environment in the Hudson Valley, analyzing her narrative as ‘contact literature’ implies a focus on Dutch cultural traces. This is done in two chapters — one dealing with Dutch language and literature, the other with Dutch Pietism and the slave narrative of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw — that present new perspectives on the impact of Dutch culture on Truth’s Narrative.

This visual essay explores slavery at the Cape from a Black feminist perspective. It articulates efforts to find out more about the enslaved people who lived in what is now my home, but was one a slave lodge under both British and Dutch colonial rule. It details my creative journey using what Audre Lorde calls 'bio-mythography' to creative imagine slave herstories in the absence of documentation on the lives and realities of enslaved women. It engages with both my African and Indian heritage through this creative, sculptural exploration.

The paper aims to analyze the aspirations for freedom expressed by the Black and the Indigenous women living in Brazilian colonial society between 1755-1800, and examines more closely the efforts they put to make their way from slavery to freedom. It is assumed that Black and Indigenous women, both freed and enslaved, were struggling to mark their place in the colonial society and to negotiate with the royal administration in Lisbon and its colonial representatives. It can be observed in complex actions taken by the Brazilian women of color to improve their lives, get the freedom and even, as far as possible, actively striving to shape their fate. There are several examples of Native and Afro-Brazilian women from different parts of colonial Brazil, who tried to make their voice to be heard by the authorities.
The Native Brazilian women demanded not only the personal freedom but also the freedom to choose and perform work according to their own will, as we will see in the case of Ana Caldeira (1783), Maria Silvana (1785), Sinflosia with their daughters Ana Raimunda and Joaquina (1788), Bonifácia da Silva (1790), Juliana (1799), Josefa Martinha (1799) and Patronilha (1799). The Black women, for instance, demanded access to court documentation in the trials in which they were involved, as was the case of Isabel Caetana, a slave woman who, on behalf of her lawyer, asked for a person to assess her market value, so she could buy her freedom (1791). If not represented by lawyers, they acted together with their masters, as it was in the case of a slave woman Mariana, who being supported by her slave owner Maria Joaquina and her daughter Ana Francisca, was demanding access to justice documentation (1799). Brazilian women’s’ struggle to obtain freedom was also carried out in courts and such cases required administrative procedures. Those situations can be illustrated by a freed slave Josefa Maria Rosário who aimed to buy the freedom of her enslaved husband, arguing she had successfully collected a sufficient amount of money (1783), a slave Geralda, who demanded freedom for herself and her children (1795), slave Luzia, who asked for her own freedom after her master's death and a slave woman Rita de Sousa Lobo who demanded freedom for her creole daughters (1799). A slave woman originally from African region Benguela, Joana Correia, complained to Brazilian authorities about an influential man named Francisco Lopes de Sousa, who decided to buy her, even though Joana had the financial means to apply for her freedom (1775).
The article illuminates the aspirations and choices of the Brazilian subaltern women and discusses the concept of freedom among them and what role it played in their lives. Besides, it also demonstrates different mechanisms for struggling for freedom, decision-making, public expression of opinion and the techniques of everyday resistance of Native and Brazilian women that might represent a very effective means of class and gender struggles in colonial slave-based Brazil.