What Makes a Woman a Member of the Elite? Women in Early Colonial Jamaica

Abstract

This work is to shine a new light on the elite women living in the British colony of Jamaica in the 1600s and 1700s. I have put this together with sources from the families living there at the time and with secondary sources that are only beginning to cover all of the information that is needed to truly understand these women. My three chapters cover the family obligations, plantation responsibilities, and social lives of these elite British plantation mistresses. The goal here has been to uncover new sources and set the stage for future works to be done on the subject. Women in the Caribbean are still a new subject for historians, but it is important to not focus too heavily on any one group of women, but to gain understanding on all of them, fitting the pieces together until we have a complete picture.