‘They are Quiet Women Now’: hair cropping, British imperial governance, and the gendered body in the archive

ABSTRACT

The punishment of hair-cropping for use on female prisoners was the subject of considerable disagreement in the British Caribbean during the post-emancipation era. Reform-minded colonial administrators thought the punishment was barbaric, whereas others believed that it was the only suitable means of disciplining unruly female inmates. The robust debate over hair cropping furnishes a lens through which to analyze competing visions of colonial rule at a moment of British imperial expansion. Moreover, the records of this debate provide critical insight into Caribbean women’s relationships with their bodies and conceptions of gender.

Acknowledgements

I thank Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Sarah Deutsch, Laurent Dubois, Anita Mercier, Jacob Soule, and many, many others – especially participants in the Southern Conference on British Studies and the Duke University Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Graduate Scholars Colloquium – for comments on drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Jacqueline Mercier Allain is a PhD candidate in the Department of History and Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University, 1356 Campus Drive, 224 Classroom Building (East Campus), Durham, NC 27708-0719, USA. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Copy of a Despatch from the Marquis of Sligo to Lord Glenelg, Papers in Explanation of Measures to give effect to Act for Abolition of Slavery: Part IV. (1) Jamaica, Barbados, British Guiana, 1836.

2 CO 23/215/58, William Robinson to the Earl of Carnarvon, 17 June 1876, ‘Cropping of women's hair: forwards reports and observations.’

3 Diana Paton, ‘The Flight from the Fields Reconsidered: Gender Ideologies and Women’s Labour in Jamaica After Slavery’, in Engendering Caribbean History: Cross-cultural Perspectives, ed. Verene Shepherd (Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle Publishers, 2011), 436.

4 On critiques of the literature on liberalism and empire, see Jennifer Pitts, ‘Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism: An Appendix’, in Empire and Modern Political Thought, ed. Sankar Muthu (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 351–387.

5 Anthony Bogues, ‘Liberalism, Colonial Power, Subjectivities, and the Technologies of Pastoral Coloniality: The Jamaican Case’, in Victorian Jamaica, ed. Tim Barringer and Wayne Modest (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2018).

6 Catherine Hall marks the 1850s as the moment when scientific racism gained widespread purchase in British thought. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 398.

7 See, especially, Hall, Civilising Subjects.

8 On imperial epistemic anxiety, see Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and the Colonial Order of Things (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)

9 Hall, Civilising Subjects. It should be noted, too, that as Hall has shown, a select few abolitionists and missionaries truly did subscribe to the doctrine of racial equality and the brotherhood of man.

10 On prohibitions on flogging incarcerated women throughout the post-emancipation (specifically post-apprenticeship) British Caribbean, see Cecilia A. Green, ‘“The Abandoned Lower Class of Females”: Class, Gender, and Penal Discipline in Barbados, 1875–1929’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 53 (2011): 144–79; Dawn P. Harris, Punishing the Black Body: Marking Social and Racial Structures in Barbados and Jamaica (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017).

11 Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–1870 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 6. This stipulation did not apply to legislative colonies, such as Jamaica.

12 Paton, No Bond but the Law, 7

13 Ibid.

14 Harris, Punishing the Black Body, 166. On the act’s omission of legislation regarding the flogging of incarcerated women, see Paton, No Bond but the Law, 110–11.

15 See Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 88–93; Paul Knepper, The Invention of International Crime: A Global Issue in the Making, 1881–1914 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 63–64.

16 For example, in apprenticeship-era Jamaica, both men and women sentenced to work in houses of correction had their hair cropped upon entry. The same was true in apprenticeship-era St. Vincent. See Sheena Boa, ‘Experiences of Women Estate Workers During the Apprenticeship Period in St Vincent, 1834–38: The Transition from Slavery to Freedom’, Women’s History Review 10 (2001): 385; Paton, No Bond but the Law, 105.

17 CO 137/485/1, ‘Practice of Cropping Hair of Female Prisoners as Punishment’, 1877.

18 Ibid., 1876.

19 James A. Thome and J. Horace Kimball, Emancipation in the West Indies: A Six Months’ Tour in Antigua, Barbadoes, and Jamaica, in the Year 1837 (New York: Published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1838), 329.

20 Knepper, The Invention of International Crime, 67.

21 CO 137/485/1, ‘Practice of Cropping Hair of Female Prisoners as Punishment’, 1877.

22 CO 23/215/58, William Robinson to the Earl of Carnarvon, 17 June 1876, ‘Cropping of women's hair: forwards reports and observations.’

23 CO 321/12/38, John Pope Hennessey to the Earl of Carnarvon, 1 July 1876, ‘Practice of cropping hair of female prisoners; Pope Hennessy instructed Des Voeux that this should be forbidden.’

24 CO 321/12/38, William Des Vœux to John Pope Hennessey, date, ‘Practice of cropping hair of female prisoners; Pope Hennessy instructed Des Voeux that this should be forbidden.’ On the contested meanings of obeah, see Diana Paton, The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Religion, Colonialism and Modernity in the Caribbean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

25 Quoted in Harris, Punishing the Black Body, 140.

26 Cecilia A. Green, ‘Local Geographies of Crime and Punishment in a Plantation Economy’, NWIG: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 86 (2012): 282.

27 Quoted in Ibid., 282.

28 St. Lucia Annual Report of the Inspector of Prisons (Castries: Government Printing Office), 9.

29 Knepper, The Invention of International Crime, 67; Jos. C. Ford and Frank Cundall, The Handbook of Jamaica for 1908: Comprising Historical, Statistical and General Information Concerning the Island Compiled from Official and Other Reliable Records, Volume 28 (London: Edward Stanford, Kingston: Government Printing Office, 1908), 186.

30 Knepper, The Invention of International Crime, 64.

31 CO 321/6, ‘Gaol Rules and Regulations’, 1876.

32 Knepper, The Invention of International Crime, 63.

33 On disciplinary power, see Michel Foucault, ‘Two Lectures’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mephan, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 78–108; on anatomo-politics, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), esp. 139.

34 Lucia Zedner, Women, Crime, and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 134.

35 For both a summary and a complication of this trajectory, see Rosalind Crone, ‘The Great “Reading” Experiment: An Examination of the Role of Education in the Nineteenth-century Gaol’, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies 16 (2012): 47–74.

36 Paton, No Bond But the Law, 106.

37 Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019), 29.

38 Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997), 3–4.

39 Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Liberal Imperialism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

40 Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. 13–14.

41 Esp. Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). See, also, Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2016).

42 Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 49.

43 Bogues, ‘Liberalism, Colonial Power, Subjectivities, and the Technologies of Pastoral Coloniality’, 158.

44 See Christienna D. Fryar, ‘Imperfect Models: The Kingston Lunatic Asylum Scandal and the Problem of Postemancipation Imperialism’, Journal of British Studies 55 (2016): 709–27.

45 Edward Beasley, Mid-Victorian Imperialists: British Gentlemen and the Empire of the Mind (London: Routledge, 2005), esp. ‘Generalizing about Humanity: Lord Carnarvon.’

46 For a study of the Jamaican case, see Jonathan Dalby, ‘“Luxurious Resting Places for the Idle and Vicious”? The Rise and Fall of Penal Reform in Jamaica in the 1840s’, Small Axe 15 (2011): 147–63.

47 Andrew Porter, ‘Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery, and Humanitarianism’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume III: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 198–221; Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 182.

48 Hall, Civilising Subjects.

49 Ibid., 23.

50 Ibid., 264.

51 Dawn Harris draws this connection in Punishing the Black Body, 137.

52 Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson, Neither Lead nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–1920 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004); Melanie J. Newton, The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); Natasha J. Lightfoot, Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015); Jenny M. Jemmott, Ties That Bind: The Black Family in Post-Slavery Jamaica, 1834–1882 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2015).

53 C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 12, 59.

54 Louis Diston Powles, The Land of the Pink Pearl, or, Recollections of Life in the Bahamas (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1888), 310.

55 Natasha Lightfoot, ‘“Their Coats were Tied Up like Men”: Women Rebels in Antigua’s 1858 Uprising’, Slavery and Abolition 31 (2010): 527–45; Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 197–202.

56 Antigua and the Antiguans: a full account of the colony and its inhabitants from the time of the Caribs to the present day, interspersed with anecdotes and legends: also, an impartial view of slavery and the free labour systems; the statistics of the island; and biographical notices of the principal families, vols. II (London: Saunders and Otley, 1844), 146.

57 Charles Kingsley, At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (London and New York: MacMillan and Co., 1871), 110.

58 Jennifer L. Morgan, ‘“Some Could Suckle Over Their Shoulder”: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770’, The William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 167–192.

59 Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1989); Hilary McD Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Women in Barbados (Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann Publishers; Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; London: James Currey, 1990).

60 This began to change during the abolitionist era, as planters became increasingly concerned with fostering slave reproduction. See Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), esp. 7.

61 Hortense J. Spillers, ‘Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, Diacritics 17 (1987), 66.

62 Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000).

63 Diana Paton and Pamela Scully, ‘Introduction: Gender and Slave Emancipation in Comparative Perspective’, in Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World, ed. Pamela Scully and Diana Paton (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005).

64 Mindie Lazarus-Black, ‘Bastardy, Gender Hierarchy, and the State: The Politics of Family Law Reform in Antigua and Barbuda’, Law and Society Review 26 (1992), 877.

65 Newton, The Children of Africa in the Colonies; Lightfoot, Troubling Freedom; Jemmott, Ties That Bind.

66 Antigua and the Antiguans, 146.

67 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, October 28 (1984): 126.

68 Charles Williams Day, Five Years’ Residence in the West Indies, in Two Volumes, vol. II (London: Colburn and Co., 1852), 111.

69 Greville John Chester, Transatlantic Sketches in the West Indies, South America, Canada, and the United States (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1869), 71.

70 ‘We want a vagrancy law … ’, The Voice of Saint Lucia, Thursday, 5 December 1895.

71 T.W.B. Hendy, An Attempt to Prove the Fallacy of Inflicting Corporal Punishment to Prevent or Lessen the Commission of Crime, and the Propriety of Immediately Restricting it to Slave Women Only by the Decision of a Magistrate, as Preparatory to its Extinction in West India Slave Discipline (Bridgetown: Printed at the Globe Office, 1833), 17.

72 Roderick A. McDonald, ed., Between Slavery and Freedom: Special Magistrate John Anderson’s Journal of St. Vincent During the Apprenticeship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 136.

73 PP. 1837–1838, vol. 40, Report of Captain J.W. Pringle on prisons in the West Indies, 4.

74 Sir George William Des Vœux, My colonial service in British Guiana, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Fiji, Australia, Newfoundland, and Hong Kong, with interludes, Volume 1 (London: John Murray, 1903), 309–10.

75 Ibid., 310.

76 Quoted in Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 62.

77 Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 143.

78 Correspondence relative to Punishment of Two Female Slaves at Port-Royal, Jamaica, 18.

79 Stephanie M.H. Camp, ‘The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830–1861’, The Journal of Southern History 68 (2002): 540.

80 Steeve Buckridge, The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890 (Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 94.

81 Erica Moiah James, ‘Object Lesson 18: Fatima, circa 1886’, in Victorian Jamaica, ed. Tim Barringer and Wayne Modest, 105–6 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2018).

82 Quoted in Paton, No Bond But the Law, 104.

83 Copy of a Despatch from the Marquis of Sligo to Lord Glenelg, 42.

84 Lightfoot, Troubling Freedom.

85 John Candler, Extracts from the Journal of John Candler Whilst Traveling in Jamaica, Part I (London: Harvey and Darton, 1840), 6.

86 David V. Trotman, ‘Women and Crime in Late Nineteenth Century Trinidad’, in Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from Emancipation to the Present, ed. Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers; London: James Currey Publishers; Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1996), 256.

87 Bridget Brereton, ‘Family Strategies, Gender and the Shift to Wage Labour in the British Caribbean’, in The Colonial Caribbean in Transition: Essays on Postemancipation Social and Cultural History, ed. Bridget Brereton and Kevin A. Yelvington (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1999), 77–107, 78.

88 Mary Turner, ‘The 11 O’clock flog: Women, Work and Labour Law in the British Caribbean’, Slavery and Abolition 20 (1999): 38–58; Paton, ‘The Flight from the Fields Reconsidered’; Jemmott, Ties That Bind, esp. 49–52; Turner, Contested Bodies.

89 Mimi Sheller, ‘Quasheba, Mother, Queen: Black Women's Public Leadership and Political Protest in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834–65’, Slavery and Abolition 19 (1998): 90–117

90 María Lugones, ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism’, Hypatia 25 (2010): 745 (my emphasis). It should be noted that it is dubious that Truth actually uttered this phrase. See Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).

91 Hortense Spillers in Conversation with Gail Lewis, 9 June 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ0ORQqSaWU.

92 Cecilia A. Green, ‘Between Respectability and Self-Respect: Framing Afro-Caribbean Women’s Labour History’, Social and Economic Studies 55 (2006): 16.

93 Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 70. My contention that working-class Caribbean women made possible new ways of being human draws from Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument’, The New Centennial Review 3 (2003): 257–337.

94 Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby’, 80.