Ex-slave women protested equal pay for equal field work after emancipation.

Evidence

Both Sonthonax and Polverel had decreed that women— who, as in slavery, had the same work responsibilities as men—were to be paid less. Many women had clearly protested, for in his February decree Polverel suggested to the men on the plantations that they should beware of the “exaggerated pretensions” of their women. He criticized the women for being unwilling to accept that the “inequality of strength that nature has placed between them and the men” as well as the “intervals of rest which their pregnancies, their childbirth, their nursing, oblige them to make” justified the difference in salaries. He was hoping, it seems, to encourage men on the plantations to stifle the resistance of the women. But women continued to protest on many plantations. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 640

Categorization

• SHARE: Worth sharing with anyone working on gender and emancipation—the administrators using ‘nature’ and pregnancy to justify pay gaps and recruiting men to silence women.
• XREF: Mirrors the resistance of enslaved women in earlier chapters and prefigures ongoing gendered labor struggles in post-emancipation societies.