"Women of the Virgin Islands: From the Field to the Legislature" recognizes and restores women to their central role in the history of the Virgin Islands by examining their lives from the earliest days of the colony's settlement. Constrained by their sex, race, and colonized status, women, nevertheless, led lives of ordinary heroism, which ensured the territory's economic, social, and cultural survival. In this comprehensive history of women in one of the world's last British colonies, O'Neal shows how women continue to define and redefine themselves and their roles in both their public and private lives, even as the colony itself undergoes its own transformation. As the twenty-first century begins, this book takes a look back at the role colonialism played in the twentieth century in furthering male political leadership and patriarchal norms. While party politics might have had the potential to advance women's political careers, O'Neal concludes they have largely failed to do so despite the advances women have made.

Beginning in the late 1600s, when the islands were first colonized by the British, O'Neal examines the growth of slavery and shows how women exercised leadership roles in their community while preserving some of the traditions of their native Africa. She moves on to discuss the shaping of women's roles after the abolition of slavery and the struggles women faced as a result. Moving into the twentieth century, the book takes a look at women in the economy, society, government, education, and even in the family, and explores how roles have grown and changed even as the islands themselves continue to be transformed. O'Neal shows that while patriarchal attitudes were strengthened, women still found their way into the public arena, albeit with difficulty, influencing all areas of social policy. This book represents a truly original and enlightening addition to the literature on the Virgin Islands and Caribbean history.

In Obeah, Race and Racism, Eugenia O'Neal vividly discusses the tradition of African magic and witchcraft, traces its voyage across the Atlantic and its subsequent evolution on the plantations of the New World, and provides a detailed map of how English writers, poets and dramatists interpreted it for English audiences. The triangular trade in guns and baubles, enslaved Africans and gold, sugar and cotton was mirrored by a similar intellectual trade borne in the reports, accounts and stories that fed the perceptions and prejudices of everyone involved in the slave trade and no subject was more fascinating and disconcerting to Europeans than the religious beliefs of the people they had enslaved. Indeed, African magic made its own triangular voyage; starting from Africa, Obeah crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean, then journeyed back across the ocean, in the form of traveller's narratives and plantation reports, to Great Britain where it was incorporated into the plots of scores of books and stories which went on to shape and form the world view of explorers and colonial officials in Britain's far-flung empire. O'Neal examines what British writers knew or thought they knew about Obeah and discusses how their perceptions of black people were shaped by their perceptions of Obeah. Translated or interpreted by racist writers as a devil-worshipping religion, Obeah came to symbolize the brutality, savagery and superstition in which blacks were thought to be immured by their very race. For many writers, black belief in Obeah proved black inferiority and justified both slavery and white colonial domination. The English reading public became generally convinced that Obeah was evil and that blacks were, at worst, devil worshippers or, at best, extremely stupid and credulous. And because books and stories on Obeah continued to promulgate either of the two prevailing perspectives, and sometimes both together until at least the 1950s, theories of black inferiority continue to hold sway in Great Britain today.