The consolidation and expansion of the forced migration of enslaved Africans came to transform the institution in various societies. The forced and systematic shipping of over twelve million Africans to the Americas led to a demographic imbalance in African societies, particularly those that lost many young men, as was the case in Senegambia (Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; Liberato et al. 2017, pp. 1-29). Despite the perception that the transatlantic slave trade consisted mainly of men, demographic data reveal that a high number of enslaved African females arrived in the Americas. In Southern Africa, the Bight of Biafra and the Bight of Benin, women represented some 49, 51 and 41 per cent respectively of all individuals deported in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Despite significant variations in the eighteenth century, 30 to 40 per cent of the Africans sent to the Americas during the period were women, and the trend continued into the nineteenth century, when 51 per cent of enslaved persons sent from the Gold Coast and 26 per cent from Southern Africa between 1826 and 1850 were women (Liberato, op. cit., pp. 15-16). Such a high proportion of enslaved females had demographic and social