‘Master Said He Was Over All the Magistrates’: Intimacy, Belonging, and Power Struggle within a Jamaican Houseful

This article examines the struggle of an enslaved mother, Catherine Whitfield, and adult daughter, Ann King, to seek legal redress for their abuse while working as domestic servants to a leading Jamaican magistrate. While well-publicized in its time, this case was often narrated through framings which emphasized spectacular violence and suffering and minimized attentions to Whitfield's and King's own strategies of resistance and survival. Centring the women's agency allows a nuanced analysis of modalities of resistance specific to their situation as a mother-daughter pair, as enslaved domestic servants, and as women.