| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, editors. Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas. (The New Black Studies.) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 329. Cloth $50.00, paper $25.00.
This collection of fourteen essays takes the reader into the complex and contradictory worlds of slavery and freedom in the Americas. By focusing on women, and on the intermediate and fragile social status of free blacks in slave societies, the volume brings out the enormous variation in slave systems in the Americas. All slave societies in the Americas had populations of free blacks, and in these populations women tended to outnumber men. But the lives of free black women varied greatly depending on a number of factors. The complexities of these women's lives, and of the worlds they lived in, make this book a fascinating read for the student of comparative American history.	1
The book is organized first to address the question of what is meant by free. In part one, titled "Achieving and Preserving Freedom," we learn that some slave women were "free" or "virtually free," such as women who lived in maroon communities, or those owned by the king of Spain in El Cobre, Cuba. In the French Caribbean, libre de fait was a "quasi free" status wherein slaves had been freed but had no official recognition of that fact. Everywhere in the Americas, many women lived as both slaves and free women. While, in the words of one manumitted woman, "to be free is very sweet," for others manumission did not significantly change their daily lives. As is well known, law and custom restricted the freedom enjoyed by free blacks, but as the essay by Loren Schweninger illustrates, free women of color in the U.S. south went to great lengths to protect their own liberty and that of family members by petitioning legislators in the General Assemblies.	. . .

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