The Women of Rendezvous

A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery

Jenny Shaw

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781469682761
  9781469682754
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469679082
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

The Women of Rendezvous is a dramatic transatlantic story about five women who birthed children by the same prominent Barbados politician and enslaver. Two of the women were his wives, two he enslaved, and one was a servant in his household. All were determined to make their way in a world that vastly and differentially circumscribed their life choices. From a Barbados plantation to the center of England’s empire in London, Hester Tomkyns, Frances Knights, Susannah Mingo, Elizabeth Ashcroft, and Dorothy Spendlove built remarkable lives for themselves and their children in spite of, not because of, the man who linked them together.

Mining seventeenth- and eighteenth-century court records, deeds, wills, church registers, and estate inventories, Jenny Shaw centers the experiences of the women and their children, intertwining the microlevel relationships of family and the macrolevel political machinations of empire to show how white supremacy and racism developed in England and the colonies. Shaw also explores England’s first slave society in North America, provides a glimpse into Black Britain long before the Windrush generation of the twentieth century, and demonstrates that England itself was a society with slaves in the early modern era.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• Acknowledgments
• Halftitle Page
• Introduction: A Barbados Family
• Chapter 1: The Place Called Rendezvous
• Chapter 2: Household Intimacies
• Chapter 3: Rites of Passage
• Chapter 4: A Great and Numerous Family in England
• Chapter 5: Courting Legitimacy
• Chapter 6: Bloodlines and Birthrights
• Conclusion:: THE LEGACIES OF RENDEZVOUS
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index