The influence of slavery on the domestic structure and family in Jamaica, Cuba and Brazil

Abstract

In the mid-1970s scholars challenged, regarding the United States and the West Indies, the view that traced contemporary disorganization of the Black family to the experience of slavery. By contrast with the earlier, almost exclusive, emphasis on the constraints that had oppressed the slaves, the author examines and compares for Jamaica, Cuba and Brazil the effects that sexuality and mating patterns had for the choices that had been available to Blacks to develop familiar behaviour and ideals of their own. During slavery and thereafter, in the different mating patterns and the household structures the critical point is gender hierarchy which invested men with the active, dominant role. The author concludes that sexuality, mating patterns and household types are the result of the interplay of the racial-class hierarchy, dominant family ideals, and gender ideology.