Insurgent women were more committed to rebellion than insurgent men

Evidence

Even Jean-François—who may have been a slave, and a maroon, before the Revolution—presented himself to Gros as a kind of hostage to the mass of the insurgents. He told Gros that he had been made “general of the negroes” by the masses of the insurgents, but that unlike them he was not fighting for “general liberty,” which he believed was an impossible goal and would have been dangerous for the “uncivilized hordes” that surrounded him. He had lesser ambitions: he railed against plantation managers and wanted them banned from Saint- Domingue. Most of the insurgents, however, were committed to the “complete destruction of the whites.” Among them, Gros wrote, the women were much “more insolent, harsher,” and less disposed to return to their plantations than the men. The insurgent leader Georges Biassou concurred, singling out the “negresses of the plantations” as a particularly rebellious and recalcitrant group. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 420

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why were enslaved women on plantations ‘more insolent and harsh’ and less willing to return than men? Worth chasing the gendered dynamics of the insurrection.
• XREF: Enslaved women as the most radical element of revolt connects to broader gendered readings of slave resistance (e.g., in US slavery historiography where women’s roles in resistance are often underestimated).