Conceiving Freedom
Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro
Camillia Cowling
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 11/2013
Pages: 344
Subject: History, Social Science
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9781469610894
DESCRIPTION
Cowling examines how women, typically illiterate but with access to scribes, instigated myriad successful petitions for emancipation, often using "free-womb" laws that declared that the children of enslaved women were legally free. She reveals how enslaved women's struggles connected to abolitionist movements in each city and the broader Atlantic World, mobilizing new notions about enslaved and free womanhood. She shows how women conceived freedom and then taught the "free-womb" generation to understand and shape the meaning of that freedom. Even after emancipation, freed women would continue to use these claims-making tools as they struggled to establish new spaces for themselves and their families in post emancipation society.