Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas

Emancipation, manumission, and complex legalities surrounding slavery led to a number of women of color achieving a measure of freedom and prosperity from the 1600s through the 1800s. These black women held property in places like Suriname and New Orleans, headed households in Brazil, enjoyed religious freedom in Peru, and created new selves and new lives across the Caribbean. Beyond Bondage outlines the restricted spheres within which free women of color, by virtue of gender and racial restrictions, carved out many kinds of existences. Although their freedom—represented by respectability, opportunity, and the acquisition of property—always remained precarious, the essayists support the surprising conclusion that women of color often sought and obtained these advantages more successfully than their male counterparts.|
Contents Preface Part 1: Achieving and Preserving Freedom 1. Maroon Women in Colonial Spanish America: Case Studies in the Circum-Caribbean, Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries Jane Landers 2. Of Life and Freedom in the (Tropical) Hearth: El Cobre, Cuba, 1709-73 Maria Elena Diaz 3. In the Shadow of the Plantation: Women of Color and the Libres de fait of Martinique and Guadeloupe, 1685-1848 Bernard Moitt 4. "To Be Free Is Very Sweet": The Manumission of Female Slaves in Antigua, 1817-26 David Barry Gaspar 5. "Do Thou in Gentle Phibia Smile": Scenes from an Interracial Marriage, Jamaica, 1754-86 Trevor Burnard 6. The Fragile Nature of Freedom: Free Women of Color in the United States South Loren Schweninger Part 2: Making a Life in Freedom 7. "Out of Bounds": Emancipated and Enslaved Women in Antebellum America Wilma King 8. Free Black and Colored Women in Early Nineteenth-Century Paramaribo, Suriname Rosemarijn Hoefte and Jean Jacques Vrij 9. Ana Paulinha de Queirós, Joaquina da Costa, and Their Neighbors: Free Women of Color as Household Heads in Rural Bahia (Brazil), 1835 B. J. Barickman and Martha Few 10. Libertas Citadinas: Free Women of Color in San Jua