ABSTRACT
The discourses of slavery and abolition measured the African Jamaican female plantation worker against a metropolitan, middle-class norm of womanhood that defined women primarily as devoted wives and caring mothers and presented the home as their proper sphere. Although the contributors to the discourses argued that she did not live up to the whole norm, they did at times suggest that she effectively exercised some of its attributes. We have seen, for example, in chapter two that in his attempts to encourage planters to take better care of nursing slave women, former planter and historian William Beckford argued that slave women were generally ‘tender of their children’. 1
