Women and Slavery

Talks about female slaves who probably constituted the considerable majority of those enslaved in Africa, Asia, and Europe over several millennia and who accounted for a greater proportion of the enslaved in the Americas than is customarily acknowledged.

The literature on women enslaved around the world has grown rapidly in the last ten years, evidencing strong interest in the subject across a range of academic disciplines. Until "Women and Slavery", no single collection has focused on female slaves who - as these two volumes reveal - probably constituted the considerable majority of those enslaved in Africa, Asia, and Europe over several millennia and who accounted for a greater proportion of the enslaved in the Americas than is customarily acknowledged. Women enslaved in the Americas came to bear highly gendered reputations among whites - as "scheming Jezebels," ample and devoted "mammies," or suffering victims of white male brutality and sexual abuse - that revealed more about the psychology of enslaving than about the courage and creativity of the women enslaved. These strong images of modern New World slavery contrast with the equally expressive virtual invisibility of the women enslaved in the Old - concealed in harems, represented to meddling colonial rulers as "wives" and "nieces," taken into African families and kin-groups in subtlely nuanced fashion.

The Americas
Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller Introduction
Mariza de Carvalho Soares Gender and Power among African Catholics in Colonial Brazil
Myriam Cottias Gender and Republican Citizenship in the French West Indies, 1848-1945
Bernard Moitt Freedom from Bondage at a Price: Women and Redemption from Slavery in the French Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century
Laurence Brown and Tara Inniss The Slave Family in the Transition to Freedom: Barbados, 1834-41
Kenneth Morgan Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica, c. 1776-1834
Henrice Altink Deviant and Dangerous: Proslavery Representations of Jamaican Slave Women's Sexuality, c. 1780-1834
Richard Follett "Lives of Living Death": The Reproductive Lives of Slave Women in the Cane World of Louisiana
Barbara Krauthamer A Particular Kind of Freedom: Black Women, Slavery, Kinship, and Freedom in the American Southeast
Laura Edwards Enslaved Women and the Law: Paradoxes of Subordination in the Post-Revolutionary Carolinas
Felipe Smith The "Condition of the Mother": The Legacy of Slavery in African American Literature of the Jim Crow Era
Claire Robertson and Marsha Robinson (Re)Modeling Slavery as if Women Matter/ed
Joseph C. Miller Domiciled and Domesticated: Slaving as a History of Women.