Inscribing Experience: An American Working Woman and an English Gentlewoman Encounter Jamaica's Slave Society, 1801–1805

Susan E. Klepp and Roderick A. McDonald

NO eyewitness account of Jamaican life and society in the early nineteenth century surpasses Maria Skinner Nugent's rich and detailed journal of her four-year residence there. Her much-cited diary is a standard reference for Jamaican and Caribbean history. 1 Yet despite Nugent's prominence in the historical literature of the Caribbean, women's perspectives remain scarce. This deficiency is unfortunate because Anglo-American married women's experiences as femes covert might have produced more sympathetic responses to the plight of slaves and sharper critiques of slave-owning society than accounts authored by men. Like enslaved men and women, free married women faced violence with little or no legal recourse. They too experienced denials of independence, mobility, property ownership, control of children, access to higher education, occupational choice, and suffrage, although differing in degrees of magnitude, consequence, or character. Free women's reactions to slave society might therefore not only reveal aspects of enslavement missed by men, but also reflect women's visions of their own rights and liabilities. 2	1
The autobiography of Eliza Chadwick Roberts significantly augments our knowledge of women's understandings of Jamaican society, given its remarkable similarities to Nugent's journal and its equally striking divergences. 3 The two women shared a number of experiences and, as important, offer many converging or complementary perspectives on both this pre-eminent sugar plantation colony in the era of slavery and women's construction of sensibility and femininity. Their sharply divergent understandings of slavery along with subtler differences in self-confidence and independence reflect contrasting backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs and help locate the factors that inclined women to particular stances on important issues of public policy. A comparison of their two accounts discloses much about Jamaica in the early nineteenth century. It reveals even more about the affinities and differences in perception of a wealthy Englishwoman and a laboring American during a period when both abolitionism and women's rights were emerging as major public issues.	2
The two women's lives converged at several points. Both were born in northeastern New Jersey: Roberts in Shrewsbury in 1784, Nugent in Perth Amboy in 1771. 4 Both married considerably older men (Roberts was nine years her husband's junior, Nugent fourteen years younger) and were accompanying their husbands on business; Captain William Roberts was a ship's master engaged in trade, and Major General George Nugent was lieutenant governor of Jamaica. The differences in age and experience could have been a source of inequality in their marriages, but their writings portray companionate unions of loving, sympathetic partners.	. . .