0.6 Gender and anti-slavery in the atlantic world  (Page 3/3)

Charlotte elizabeth tonna

Visual images often accompanied reformist writings or were distributed on their own. Although the anonymous commentary does not contain a visual image, Figure 3 represents a typical portrayal of the abuse of enslaved women. This image reflects a growing concern over how punishment often led to the clothing of enslaved women being damaged or destroyed, thus resulting in the display of their bare bodies. The anonymous commentator notes that the Jamaican debates included a provision "that in the whipping of women there should be no indecent exposure," however, these regulations were consistently rejected and/or ignored in the colonies (1). These concerns continued to mount as Jamaican planters turned to the treadmills to punish women in prisons during the early 1830s. The treadmill was eventually discontinued as a method of punishment due, in no small part, to the graphic images of abused women circulated by anti-slavery activists. While there is no standard visual image used within introductory U.S. history and literature courses to represent the abuse of slave women, it is possible for educators to find a variety of anti-slavery cartoons, newspaper illustrations, and plantation photographs for students to analyze alongside images from throughout the Americas, such as Figure 3. These images all travelled via the information network forged by reformers within the Americas and beyond and this contributed to the gradual destruction of slavery in Jamaica and elsewhere. The anonymous commentary provides a brief glimpse into the ways in which the dialogue surrounding anti-slavery and slavery was both gendered and global.

Flagellation of a female samboe slave

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