Menagere

The ménagère was a free woman of color — often a housekeeper and domestic partner — in colonial Saint-Domingue. Distinct from the later mythology that reduced such women to passive erotic objects, the ménagère occupied an active economic role: she could be salaried, could negotiate terms with her employer or partner, managed a household, and could claim expectations from the man whose domestic world she organized. The figure sits at the intersection of racial hierarchy, gender, and economic life in the plantation colony.