Racialized Motherhood

By Felicia J. Fricke.

Between 1789 and 1830, the population structure of the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Eustatius changed markedly. At the beginning of this period, the island was populated by 4,944 enslaved people, 2,375 white people, and 511 free people of colour.[1] At the end, there were 1,614 enslaved people, 132 white people, and 527 free people of colour.[2] The enslaved population had decreased by almost 70 percent due to the abolition of the slave trade and increases in manumissions, while the white population had decreased by almost 95 percent as elites left the region to find more lucrative schemes elsewhere. Meanwhile, the population of free people of colour remained quite stable, increasing by around 3 percent over these four decades. These changes had significant impacts on who controlled the wealth and power in the shrinking free society of this small island.

Population of St. Eustatius between 1780 and 1884.[3]

My recent article “Stability and survival: Creole widowhood in St. Eustatius, 1780s-1820s”, published open access in the journal The History of the Family,[4] demonstrates how Creole widows were the most long-lived, and therefore most stable, portion of free society during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Based on marriage and death data collected by the St. Eustatius government, as well as probate documentation, it provides evidence that widows (particularly Creole widows) were likely to survive decades longer than their husbands, who were often European and unused to the Caribbean disease environment. Being widowed was more advantageous for women’s survival than either marriage or spinsterhood. Not only did widowhood allow them to avoid the dangers of childbirth, but it also allowed them to inherit the wealth of one (or more) husbands. By the 1820s, the free population of St. Eustatius was probably less than 1,000 people, the size of a village. Thus, widowed women who married and remarried several times were connected to family networks across the island and beyond. The free population of St. Eustatius during this period was a profoundly internally connected one.

Despite the narrowness of this society in some ways, widowhood presented many women in St. Eustatius with a newfound autonomy. Whilst married, the law viewed them as minors, but upon widowhood, a woman was considered an adult regardless of her calendar age. Indeed, it was possible for girls to be married and widowed as young as twelve years old. The youngest bride in the data from St. Eustatius is Francina Salomons, who married her thirty-year old husband in 1803, when she was only thirteen. Widowed women were suddenly responsible for estates, enslaved people, wards, children, and finances in a way they had not been before. In my article, evidence from the Dutch National Archives shows that Statia’s widows proactively navigated these new responsibilities, petitioning the courts for help where necessary.

However, we must also take into account the impact of social race and social class on the lives of widowed women in St. Eustatius. My article tries to do this despite the dearth of evidence for the lives of freedwomen and free women of colour. For example, I discuss the experiences of Ann Celeste Corbiere, a free woman of colour whose husband died in 1812. He left most of the property to their children, but Ann could still have the use of a building as well as exploiting the labour of several enslaved people. With these resources, she ran a shop selling items such as mackerel, rice, soap, and wine to local patrons. Thus, Ann Celeste became an essential community member. Although in this case her husband had left a will, marriage offered widows protection in that it ensured them an inheritance even without one. However, many free women of colour would not, or could not, marry their partners. This could have been for many reasons, including a lack of funds, legal impossibility, or simply the wish to remain independent. The low rates of marriage amongst Statian free women of colour prevented them from being protected by intestate inheritance law if their partner passed away, ensuring that wealth often remained within the white population of the island.

On the other hand, widowhood did not necessarily represent an economic or social advantage for poor women (white and of colour) without local social networks. Swaantje Rinkenberg was one such woman. When her husband passed away in 1798, she was left completely destitute. The Dutch couple had owned almost nothing but the clothes on their backs, and she could not even pay off her deceased husband’s debts to settle his estate. With all her family on the other side of the Atlantic, remarriage became a matter of survival, and she married her next husband five years later in 1803.

What these examples and others in my article show is that St. Eustatius’ widows in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a demographic whose stories help us to understand colonial society as a whole. The evidence places local women at the centre of society, forging inter-familial connections across their long lifespans and ensuring that accumulated wealth passed to the next generation. Their influence must only have grown as the free population shrank ever further in the years leading up to the abolition of slavery. Additionally, these findings are a great example of what happens when we ask not only who died earliest, but also who lived the longest. This question allows us to see more clearly the groups whose investments in and contributions to colonialism were so important in maintaining imperial dominion.

You can read the full article here.

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[1] Cornelis Christiaan Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guianas, 1680-1791, ed. by Maria J. L. van Yperen (Van Gorcum, 1985), p. 152.

[2] Stanley L. Engerman and Barry W. Higman, ‘British Repression of the Illegal French Slave Trade: Some Considerations’, in The Slave Societies of the Caribbean, ed. by Franklin W. Knight, General History of the Caribbean (UNESCO Publishing, 1997), III, pp. 45–104.

[3] Felicia Fricke, ‘Stability and Survival: Creole Widowhood in St. Eustatius, 1780s-1820s’, The History of the Family, published online 2025, doi:10.1080/1081602X.2025.2556727; J. Hartog, History of St. Eustatius (Central U.S.A. Bicentennial Committee of the Netherlands Antilles : distributors, De Witt Stores N.V., 1976); Engerman and Higman, ‘British Repression of the Illegal French Slave Trade: Some Considerations’.

[4] Fricke, ‘Stability and Survival: Creole Widowhood in St. Eustatius, 1780s-1820s’.