Marronnage — Women's Resistance

Women appear throughout the Saint-Domingue marronnage advertisements, though less frequently than men. Their stories reveal specific dimensions of female resistance to slavery and the particular vulnerabilities women faced. Women fled in pairs or with family members across plantations and islands; followed kinship networks; and sometimes fled with children despite the added risk. The ads describe women's bodies in invasive detail — breast condition, skin tone, facial features — documenting the sexualized gaze of slaveholders and the physical toll of plantation labor. White women and free women of color were also substantial slaveholders, complicating simple gendered readings of the system. Women's marronage networks, forged in the hidden spaces of plantation life and the dangerous geography of flight, became part of the revolutionary infrastructure of 1791.