This chapter focuses on gender and slavery, and in particular on the rhetoric of thinking about wives as slaves in both the pre- and postabolition contexts, and in the different and parallel conversations about empire that went on through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the process of transforming humanity into moral beings, gender as a register of difference played out in complex ways that troubled the concept of personhood as a status and redrew some of the boundaries of enslavability. The place of women within the discourses of debasement and inferiority was part of both the universality and the fragmenting of humanity, pulled in both directions by ideas about nature, progress and civilisation. The borders between free and unfree labour, labour and capital, persons and property were even more undecided, and more heavily policed, for women. The distinction between honourable labour and drudgery, and questions of autonomy, morality and honour were highly gendered and mediated through marriage as well as wage contracts. The ‘vision of useful men and protected wives’ meant that wage and marriage agreements mutually reinforced one another (Cope 2004, 10) and enforced a particular and gendered conception of freedom. This chapter explores some of the silences and occlusions that surrounded women's experience of sexual subjection under slavery, their agency and power under conditions of ‘oppressive freedom’, and the spaces they inhabited and experienced as loopholes of retreat and as stifling prisons. The complications of home, the ‘collapsed geography’ of the plantation household, and the contested meanings of the private/public divide require us to think about the power relations within the household, between women and men, but also between women and women living in constant contact with one another (Glymph 2008).

MARRIAGE AND SLAVERY

John and Mary Hylas were slaves who were brought over to England in 1754, and were married with the consent of their respective master and mistress. In 1766, Mary was sent away to Barbados without her husband's consent, and John Hylas sued her master, John Newton (UCL, 2017a), for damages, claiming that he had kidnapped Mary and resold her into slavery in Barbados.