If you are planning to take a vacation in Jamaica, you should look into the various all inclusive packages, honeymoon packages and the beach house villas. You should also familiarize yourself with Jamaican politics and history, as they will play a bigger role that you think on your Jamaican vacation. Both men and women created the culture of open rebellion that characterized the slavery world, and helped propel the movement towards emancipation and full freedom.



In the 1831 'Christmas Rebellion' intimately associated with one of its outstanding leaders, Sam Sharpe, women's roles have been recorded by contemporary observers.

This rebellion erupted in St James. The main cause was enslaved people's belief that they were to be 'freed at Christmas ...and that their freedom order had actually come out of England but was being withheld and that they only had to strike en masse, and they should gain their object'. Enslaved men and women from pens and plantations in Trelawny and St James had apparently agreed that any attempt to force them back to work after the Christmas holidays was to be met by setting fire to the properties, (though not their huts and provision grounds).

The inequities of post-slavery Jamaican society ensured that the descendants of enslaved peoples would continue the struggle for complete emancipation; emancipation not just as an event, but also as a condition of human progress. Protest action, the most notable being the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, was widespread in the post-1838 period and was attributable to the failure of post-slavery regimes to deliver on the promise of freedom by honouring freed people's claims to citizenship, civil rights and political enfranchisement.

While the Morant Bay Rebellion has been associated with Paul Bogle and George William Gordon, women also played crucial roles, for example organising many of Paul Bogle's meetings.

One Caroline Grant was referred to by a police officer at Morant Bay as 'a queen of the rebels', while Grant and Sarah Johnson ordered fleeing men to return to the scene of action. Elizabeth Taylor even beat Joseph Williams when he tried to run away. Additionally, as Clinton Hutton tells us, women like Caroline Grant, Sarah Johnson and Ann Thompson raided police stations for guns and ammunition; and Elizabeth Taylor mobilized support for the cause. Radical women joined their male colleagues in the decolonization movement that intensified after 1865. For after the brutal suppression of the Morant Bay Rebellion, the state reacted by removing the elective principle in government and installing the Crown Colony system of government.

The ruling elite believed that the potential for radical transformation would be considerably diminished once measures to curb the freedom of African-Caribbeans by retaining control of the government were effected. However, despite their optimism, protest action, far from decreasing, escalated after 1865.

In one sense, Caribbean rebel women sacrificed their own feminist concerns initially in solidarity with their male counterparts during the height of the decolonisation movement.

Despite the association of the Caribbean labour movement of the 1930s, the franchise movement of the 1940s and the independence struggles of the 1960s with men like Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley, women were very much involved.