A contribution to the rapidly expanding field of Atlantic studies, this collection of essays focuses on how women responded to and participated in the colonial experience, whether at the center or the periphery of empires. The editor's aim is to add a cultural, and more particularly, gendered dimension to the existing body of work on economic, political and demographic trends in the region. According to Jaffary, what the women examined in the volume have in common is that they were directly exposed to strategies employed by European powers to dominate their colonies. At that point their experiences diverge: some participated actively in the colonisation project while others found themselves at the other end of the bargain, i.e. forced to respond.
The volume is organised into four sub-categories: frontiers, female religious, race mixing, and networks. In the part on frontiers, Metcalf deals with women as go-betweens in sixteenth century Brazil, finding such roles for women an ‘exception, not the norm’ (p. 28), while Erickson examines violence against European, Indian and mixed-race women on the frontier of New Spain. What stands out here is Ben Marsh's contribution on Georgian women in the early eighteenth century. It provides an excellent view of the ‘elasticity’ (p. 53) of women's experience on the frontier, or in other words how it could go both ways.
In the second part, on female religious, Broomhall details first how nuns in the Benedictine convent of Beaumont les-Tours took in a métis woman from Acadia, and eventually gave her the habit, their attitudes changing from calling her a ‘savage’ to accepting her as a nun of equal status. In the second essay, Bristol focuses on a woman from Guinea-Bissau who worked as a servant in a convent in Puebla, to be given the habit on her deathbed. While she was revered by local society for her piety, the author stresses that her vida only served to reinforce existing views on gender and calidad, by emphasising that she was unique amongst people of her rank. The final contribution, by Kathryn Burns, details how propertied, upwardly mobile Andeans who did not belong to the Inca lineage or the aristocracy in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, made a bid for ‘decency’ (p. 82) by founding and sending their daughters to beaterios, thus assuring a respectable reputation in colonial society.
In the third part, Jaffary shows how church authorities in Mexico shied from upholding Trent's regulations on consanguine marriage in a nod to the particular nature of the colonial situation, while Fabella explores the image of mulatto women in colonial Saint Domingue, using a proposal for social reforms published in 1776. She shows how the mulâtresse, a free woman of mixed background and uncertain rank, was considered a potential threat to the stability of colonial society. And Fleming provides a fascinating account of the fluid lives of métis women on Mackinac Island in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries whose practice of marrying incoming French, British and American men created a mixed antebellum society in which these women often found space to assert themselves while retaining their native traditions in dress and daily activities.
The final category on female networks contains two contributions: Van Deusen shows how spiritually inclined women in seventeenth century Lima established connections regardless of race or class, thus challenging modern notions of ‘place and space as sources of belonging’ (p. 150). And Rupert does much the same in her exploration of women's participation in inter-imperial trade networks between Curaçao and mainland Spanish America.
Patricia Seed draws together the book's various themes into a synthesis on women on the Atlantic, contrasting the acceptance of the mixed-race offspring of colonisation in Brazil and the French colonies with higher barriers in Spanish America, and virtual rejection in Anglo-American society. She also contrasts the opportunities for laywomen of European and mixed ancestry to participate in trade with greater restrictions on mixed native-European women to advance socially within Iberian convents.
Seed's key word for women in the Atlantic world is ‘disjointed’ (p. 171) which indeed might, in spite of this collection's many strengths, be used to describe this volume. Only three of eleven contributions deal with North America or Europe leaving the reader with a bland image of the ‘Atlantic World.’ And while the book's undoubted value lies in how many of the essays examine individual cases – all fascinating – thus pulling the reader in close to local realities, the authors' treatment is often rather heavy, and focuses on bringing the stories of individuals in line with current views on gender and ethnicity in the colonies. When, for example, the nuns of Puebla admit that their ‘nature’ led them to mistreat a black servant famed for holiness, the author prefers to conclude that rigid attitudes prevailed with regard to the ‘impossibility of black piety’ (p. 79). Given the evidence set forth by these essays, the reader might emerge with stronger impressions if the editor and many of the contributors had been more forthcoming with regard to what Marsh terms the ‘elasticity’ of colonial society. It is a given that colonial societies would be obsessed with reinforcing rigid hierarchies of race, class and gender. What took place beneath that shell is the interesting part. Nevertheless, this is a strong book in that it draws together stories of women's lives in different corners of the European empires. It should be of great value to both students and scholars of the Atlantic world alike.
