Camillia Cowling

Negotiating freedom: Women of colour and the transition to free labour in Cuba, 1870–1886

This article argues that women of colour were central to the process of the legal transition to free labour in Cuba. Through an examination of legal appeals for freedom – which were often facilitated by new opportunities created by transition legislation – it shows that women were motivated by factors such as their families and frequently by their position as urban domestic servants. They could also make use of gendered understandings of slavery and freedom, which were socially prevalent although not legally enshrined. The paper argues that a focus on women and gender may have important implications for our understanding of Cubas transition to free labour and of some of the constructions of citizenship and nationhood with which it was entwined.

Mothering slaves: comparative perspectives on motherhood, childlessness, and the care of children in Atlantic slave societies

Kingston, Jamaica, 1831: A newspaper published by free men of colour which campaigns for free coloured civil rights publishes a letter attacking free women of colour for their inadequate motherhood, and specifically their failure to foster respectable sexual morality in their daughters. Such women, the letter writer claims, have themselves been ‘schooled to vice from their earliest years’, and as a result, they ‘bring up their daughters to tread in their own footsteps’. Vicksburg, Mississippi, United States, 1860: A woman freed from slavery by the Emancipation Proclamation is one of tens of thousands expelled from the city by Union forces. She dies at the side of the road leading out of Vicksburg, leaving the infant she had been carrying uncared for. Taubaté, Southeastern Brazil, 1886: Ambrosina, an enslaved woman, is forced to move from her hometown to this new place where she knows no-one, in order to provide care, including breast milk, for the young son of her owner. When the baby Benedito dies of suffocation, Ambrosina is prosecuted for his murder. These brief fragments about the lives of enslaved and freed women from different societies in the Americas, taken from the articles in this special issue, hint at just a few of the contested relationships experienced by mothers in Atlantic slave societies. As these vignettes suggest, enslaved women’s coerced labour frequently included the performance of caring work associated with motherhood for the free children of their owners, while in situations that made it extremely difficult for them to successfully care for their own children. Meanwhile, the strategies they adopted in response to these and similar tensions frequently placed these women under moral scrutiny from those around them, including sometimes those from their own communities. Historians writing about enslaved women’s mothering have to work hard to get beyond the long-accreted layers of mystification that have developed,