ABSTRACT
Understandings of sexual difference and social articulations of gender roles were crucial to the everyday maintenance of the slave system in the eighteenthcentury Atlantic world. The gendered nature of the political economy of slavery was reflected in the relations of power and sexual divisions of labor in plantation societies. White women occupied complicated positions within these societies. Though their location within the colonizing group afforded them a degree of privilege and power over black slaves, white women were subjected to white patriarchal authority and were assigned those duties considered to fall within the private, domestic sphere, including the care of husbands, children, and the plantation household. Yet despite the ostensibly private nature of women’s roles, the intimate, everyday practices of women had important political and economic effects on plantation society.
