This session will address the experiences of newly freed women in Antigua as particularly disadvantaged in the post emancipation transition, as shown in how they endured the restrictions of the Christian Churches and moreover, the spillover of those restrictions into their homes and family formation processes. Their difficulties in terms of building stable intimacies and safe domestic spaces for themselves, in the context of the dire economic straits that the entire island experienced after the 1834 emancipation, will demonstrate that while freedom as a whole fell short of all Black people’s desires, it especially failed to liberate women.
Natasha Lightfoot is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Faculty Fellow in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation (Duke University Press, 2015), which focuses on black working people’s struggles and everyday forms of liberation in Antigua and Barbuda after slavery’s end.