Doing Comparative Caribbean (Gender) History: Puerto Rican and Belizean Working-Class Women, 1830s–1930s

Abstract

The engendering of Hispanic and Anglophone history being undertaken in the Caribbean still all too often proceeds along parallel paths, never quite meeting. -Jean Stubbs, "Gender in Caribbean History" This essay takes up Jean Stubbs's challenge to write gender histories that cross linguistic, national, and imperial lines; 1 in the process it makes a case for comparative Caribbean historiography rooted in boundary-crossing research. Drawing on fruitful approaches to and examples of the genreincluding those contributed by historical sociologists-the essay illustrates the commensurability of apparently disparate cases through a discussion of Puerto Rico and Belize from abolition to the 1930s. In the process, it reveals the paucity of historiography on intra-Caribbean comparisons as well as racialized assumptions of binary difference still embedded in discussions about working women in the Spanish and British Caribbeans. Through both critique and illustration, it maps out a methodology for doing comparative gender history rooted in comparisons across spectrums of similarity and difference at the levels of social life, economic activity, and political choice.