Cowling, Camillia (2013) Conceiving freedom : women of color, gender, and the abolition of slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 9781469610870 (In Press)

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Book
Divisions:	Faculty of Arts > History
Publisher:	University of North Carolina Press
Place of Publication:	Chapel Hill
ISBN:	9781469610870
Official Date:	November 2013
Dates:	Date Event November 2013 Published
Number of Pages:	352
Status:	Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	In Press
Access rights to Published version:	Restricted or Subscription Access

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