who “trampass about their streets, in this their warlike posture and thus arrayed they will sip a cup of punch rum with anyone.” William Pittis in 1720 proclaimed that the climate so affected people that “if a woman land there as chaste as a Vestal she becomes in forty eight hours a perfect Messalina and that it is as impossible for a woman to live at Jamaica and preserve her Virtue as for a Man to make a Voyage to Ireland and bring back his Honesty.” By the late eighteenth century even the agency that was afforded by being a whore or a petty criminal was denied to ordinary white women, who were regarded as constant and affectionate but also as inordinately lazy and small-minded. William Beckford of Hertford Pen wrote in his 1788 history of Jamaica that white women were a sex that “suffers much, submits too much and leads a life of toil and misery.”106
The same progression of images also was something that occurred in Saint-Domingue. The practice of sending women from French poor houses to the Antilles did not succeed in balancing the gender ratio in seventeenth-century Saint-Domingue as it did in Martinique.107 Throughout its colonial history, Saint-Domingue had far more white men than white women, despite royal efforts to provide additional female colonists. Recent historians have argued that these women were from respectable households, but the contemporary image of these filles du roi in the Caribbean was overwhelmingly negative: they were troublemakers, prostitutes, and poorly suited for marriage.108 In the 1780s the Baron de Wimpffen relayed this common image of the first female migrants, noting that “they sent whores from the Salpêtrière [prison], sluts picked up in the gutter, cheeky tramps.”109 Other women may have been put off coming to Saint-Domingue by the negative representations made about women who were already there. In 1713 the colony’s administrators informed Versailles, “We need at least 150 girls, but we ask you not to take any from the bad parts of Paris as usual; their bodies are as corrupted as their morals, they only infect the colony and are not at all good for reproduction.”110 The complaints about the morals and health of white female colonists continued in 1743 when Saint-Domingue’s governor complained that France was sending women “whose aptitude for reproduction is for the most part destroyed by too much use.” As he put it a few months later, “Real colonists are only made in bed,” referring to the need for an island-born population.111 In the same vein, in 1750 Emilien Petit, who was himself a creole, advocated that the Crown send more single women to Saint-Domingue to attach male colonists to the colony permanently.112
After midcentury, however, French officials and visitors gave up on the idea of using marriage between white men and women to repopulate and stabilize the colony. In 1779, Desdorides described relations between men and women in Saint-Domingue as completely different from France. He commented that “men here pay all their attention to their financial interests. Their passion for wealth weakens their desire to be loved. Therefore between them and women there are none of those sweet sentimental emotions that bind two honest hearts…. Those wives who come to America … have little to do and are relegated to their plantations.”113 Baron de Wimpffen described white women as living in decadence and boredom and agreed with Girod-Chantrans that they were crueler to their slaves than were most men.114 Thus, the same assumptions and stereotypes that operated in Jamaica were also working in Saint-Domingue.
Moreau de Saint-Méry agreed with de Wimpffen: “The state of idleness in which creole women are raised, the heat they are accustomed to experiencing, the indulgence perpetually extended to them; the effects of a vivid imagination & an early development, all produces an extreme sensitivity in their nervous system. It is this very sensitivity that produces their indolence which pairs with their vivacity to create a temperament that is fundamentally a little melancholy.” He continued, “Who would not be disgusted to see a delicate woman who cries over the story of the slightest misfortune preside over a punishment she ordered! Nothing can equal the anger of a creole woman who punishes the slave that her spouse may have forced to soil the marriage bed.”115
This succession of stereotypes from both colonies illustrates that white men did not see white women clearly. They tended to describe women’s differences in terms of race rather than social class, a tendency that has been replicated by most modern historians. Edward Long and Moreau de Saint-Méry, among others, divided women in their societies among consuming white women, producing black women, and parasitical brown women. Long condemned white women for their “constant intercourse from their birth with Negroe domestics whose drawling, dissonant gibberish they insensibly adopt,” meaning that their “ideas are narrowed to … the business of the plantation, the tittle-tattle of the parish, the tricks, superstitions, diversions and profligate discourses of black servants.” Moreau followed a similar line but with more analytical reasoning and a more interesting conclusion. He argued that white women were removed from the processes of production almost completely by black women and that they had lost their sexual role within the planter household to brown mistresses. All that was left for them, he suggested, was a largely symbolic role as the keepers of racial purity, achieved through their reproductive function as the producers of white children.116 Yet white women were not merely present in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. They were active agents in urban life.117 There is no reason why we need to accept as true the gendered inaccuracies put forward by contemporary male observers in both colonies who saw women as dangerous strumpets in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and as redundant ornaments by the late eighteenth century.
The best example of a white woman as active agent in mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica was Teresia Constantia Phillips.118 A famed beauty, as her portrait by Joseph Highmore in 1748 reveals, she cut a swathe through fashionable society in Britain as a participant in the demimonde of Augustan London, first as the mistress (shamefully abandoned, she argued) of the future fourth Earl of Chesterfield and then as the wife and lover of numerous other rich and fashionable men. A colossal spendthrift, a lover of theatre and social assemblies, she ended up cutting her losses in love and money and moving to Jamaica around the year 1751 in order to be with her wealthy Jamaican lover, the Clarendon planter Henry Needham. There, she continued her scandalous life as a courtesan, arbiter of social life in the capital, St. Jago de la Vega, and devoted self-fashioner. She was singular as a woman in Jamaica in having an official government post, as Mistress of the Revels, a largely invented position given to her by Needham’s friend, Governor Henry Moore. She received a small government stipend for this role and presided over Jamaica’s small but flourishing dramatic scene. In her official capacity, she oversaw and orchestrated all events involving the governor, such as the balls, assemblies, and entertainments held in the governor’s honor. More significantly, she gave official approval to all theatrical productions, earning herself 200 guineas for this task.119 It was a perfect position for her, as her life was as theatrical as a life could be in a mid-eighteenth-century British colony.
Figure 11. Teresia Constantia Phillips by John Faber Jr., after Joseph Highmore, mezzotint, 1748. © National Portrait Gallery.
Phillips’s theatrical and ceremonial responsibilities made her a figure to be reckoned with.120 To an extent, she demonstrated the “cultural heteroglossia” of mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica, where multiple displaced, avaricious, and exiled people created a syncretic culture, although Phillips did not show any interest in non-British theater or revelry. But she demonstrated how Jamaica manifested a particular kind of Englishness, an aspect of metropolitan culture that disturbed contemporaries with its materialism, and acceptance of all kinds of transgressions—financial, ethical, and sexual.121 As Kathleen Wilson notes, Phillips “appreciated her cachet as an émigré who could perform the role of the poised and witty English lady with considerable aplomb.” She mixed with leading planters and denigrated creole women, whom she thought immodest, dull, and crass with tongues that expressed “the meanest satire.” She made a great deal of her Englishness and her patriotism, even writing an anonymous letter published in the Kingston Journal that condemned the overly exuberant celebrations of planters in Spanish Town following their defeat of Governor Knowles in 1756 when he attempted to transfer the capital to Kingston.
