| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas. Ed. by David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. xii, 329 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 0-252-02939-9. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 0-252-07194-8.)
Noting that free people of color never fully escaped the degrading effects of race-based slavery, David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine offer fourteen essays that explore women's experiences of race, gender, and class in the slaveholding societies of the United States, the Caribbean, and South America. The book is divided into two sections, both of which contain rich information about enslaved as well as free women of color. The first section is organized around the conditions under which women achieved freedom; the second, around women's economic and social adjustment to freedom. Key themes such as quality of freedom, economic status, and racial mixing are addressed in both sections.	1
The collection reveals important differences between slave societies while it demonstrates the limits of freedom for nonwhite peoples in all of them. How women experienced freedom varied from society to society; sometimes enslaved women experienced greater mobility and familial security than did free women of color. For example, María Elena Díaz analyzes royal slavery in eighteenth-century El Cobre, Cuba, where the king of Spain's ownership of slaves, as opposed to private, individual ownership, "blurred boundaries between freedom and bondage in many spheres of life" (p. 19). Díaz finds this especially true for women, who maintained autonomous households and families while males labored in various endeavors away from their village at the behest of the Crown. This arrangement encouraged matrifocal households in El Cobre. By the same token, however, the absence of private masters enabled male slaves to dominate slave women to a degree not possible in most slave communities.	. . .

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