“She Has Not Been Seen or Heard of Since”

As colonial racialized subjects, Afro-Bahamian men and women were different from British subjects, and thus required a different treatment before the law. Punishment was racialized and gendered, and the discourses and resulting practices of punishment criminalized men’s and women’s bodies in distinctive ways. Evidence shows that women were as likely as men to find themselves involved with the law, and high numbers of women were arraigned by the courts and convicted of various crimes. Colonial records provide rare information about their involvement with the law, the specific nature of their crimes, and their treatment in the judicial system. Afro-Bahamian women who did not conform to society’s elite moral code were considered a threat to colonial respectability and were often found to be more intractable than men, resulting in harsh, humiliating punishments. Above all, the records demonstrate that these women exercised some form of agency, transgressing the boundaries that kept them subordinate.