ABSTRACT
An exchange of sex for material benefits or money has been evident in the Caribbean region for several centuries. Under slavery such transactions were lodged at the nexus of at least two areas of women’s existence: as an extension of sexual relations (forced or otherwise) with white men and as an income-generating activity for both slave and “free colored” women. In Barbadian society in the early 1800s, for example, slave women were frequently hired out by white and free colored families as “nannies, nurses, cooks, washerwomen, hucksters, seamstresses,” yet “the general expectation of individuals who hired female labor under whatever pretense was that sexual benefits were included.”1 Concubines served as both mistresses and housekeepers and were sometimes hired out by their owners to sexually service other men in order to obtain cash. Furthermore, in times of economic slumps on plantations (particularly in British colonies), when enslaved men and women were commanded by plantation owners to provide for themselves or to bring in money to sustain the plantation through work outside the plantation, slave women were placed on the urban market as prostitutes by sugar planters. In one of the most thorough studies to date of women’s labor in the English-speaking Caribbean, Rhoda Reddock notes for Trinidad: “For the most part women were hired out as domestic slaves, field laborers, as concubines, to temporary male European settlers, or were made to work as petty traders or prostitutes handing over most of their earning to their masters.”2 Black women’s manual and sexual labor was, in effect, “pimped” by the slaveholders. European women were not exempt
from the position of “pimp,” as they may have owned and managed as much as 25 percent of Caribbean slaves, and many “made a thriving business from the rental of black and colored women for sexual services in the port towns.”3 Cases mentioned in historical records of slave women in the French Caribbean who, besides their marketing activities, were able to profit financially from selling their own or their daughters’ sexual labor have also been remarked upon by some historians, indicating that besides being pimped by slave owners, slave women also took up sexual-economic activities in order to make a living independent from slavery.4 In some instances, sex was provided by slave women in exchange for weapons that could be used to attack the plantation system, and prostitution was a means through which women, inside and outside of slavery, could establish a semblance of autonomy from the harsh conditions of agricultural or domestic labor and work independently. Lodging-house proprietresses-who were predominantly “mulatto”— “turned their weaknesses into strength by capitalizing upon white men’s sexual desire for women of color.”5
