The savage slave mistress: Punishing women in the British Caribbean, 1750–1834

ABSTRACT In 1775, on a tour of the West Indies, Henry Smeathman produced a sketch entitled Creole Delicacy or The Domestic Felicity of Africans in the West Indies (published 1788). The image depicts a flogging presided over by an elegantly dressed white woman slave owner, standing tall in marked contrast to her spreadeagled victim. Smeathman's aim is to present a naturalistic portrait of an everyday event, one which reveals the white woman's “private” flogging as continuous with the cruelty of the cane fields. Drawing upon both visual and literary representations of the cruel white slave mistress, including paintings, prints and drawings as well as travel narratives, diaries, and abolitionist and didactic literature, the authors show that white women's agency regarding slavery has been “profoundly underestimated,” leading to a double erasure of them and the enslaved people they owned. The authors conclude that white women were not innocent bystanders to slavery's brutality.