In
Conceiving Freedom, Camillia Cowling shows how gender
shaped urban routes to freedom for the enslaved during the process
of gradual emancipation in Cuba and Brazil, which occurred only
after the rest of Latin America had abolished slavery and even
after the American Civil War. Focusing on late nineteenth-century
Havana and Rio de Janeiro, Cowling argues that enslaved women
played a dominant role in carving out freedom for themselves and
their children through the courts.
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.