Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

The reader could be forgiven for questioning what this book could tell us that would be new and important. The danger that it might duplicate previous studies or, worse, simplify a complex topic because of the comparative treatment would seem to be substantial. However, Camillia Cowling's well-written and deeply researched book takes an original approach to the vast topic of slavery and its abolition. She delves into significant themes and utilizes the comparative framework to elucidate her arguments. Cowling focuses on the agency of slave women in both Cuba and Brazil in gaining freedom for themselves and, especially, for their children, as well as the characteristics of that agency. She makes a strong argument that enslaved women in both countries were the most frequent, persistent, and successful advocates for manumission for themselves and their children in the late nineteenth century. Unlike male slaves, women utilized legal means to incrementally increase their freedom, asking to be allowed to live in a particular location, to be sold to a different master, or to systematically purchase the freedom of themselves or their children. These efforts constituted a gradual but often-effective means to achieve freedom.While antislavery sentiment was rising throughout the world, both Brazil and Cuba were rapidly importing slaves as Atlantic commerce in coffee and sugar boomed. In that climate, abolition efforts in these countries faced difficult odds. In both countries the strategy of “gradual abolition” resulted in “free womb” laws to allow children of slaves to be freed and in laws to free the elderly. The contradictory consequences of these laws and the ways in which it was impossible to separate the fate of children from the living conditions of their mothers are important to the narrative. Rather than focus on outcomes of manumission efforts or the number of manumissions, Cowling emphasizes the process followed and the strategies employed by women slaves as revealed in the legal claims of individuals in both countries. She argues that in both countries abolition was deeply gendered and that the discourse of motherhood was crucial and finally influenced the abolition debate as a whole, as well as subsequent discourse on the family and citizenship. The question of whether maternity was a characteristic all women who gave birth could claim or was restricted to those of educated or “civilized” background was a determining factor to success. Commentators at the time focused on the somewhat contradictory arguments on the equality of the enslaved to other women, on the one hand, and “deep fears about biological and moral corruption from nonwhite people” (p. 98), on the other.Strategies for freedom included efforts to relocate from rural to urban settings. Cowling makes a strong case that freedom of mobility greatly improved women's chances to accumulate funds for purchasing at least the down payment on a desired manumission. She argues that coartaciόn — the “act of making a down-payment toward freedom that fixed one's price and … sale” — was important for slaves due to “its promise of increased control over one's own sale or movement” (p. 128). This is an important point, since the majority of slaves who began the process of coartaciόn never completely gained their freedom. However, they may have successfully purchased the freedom of children or kin. Geography was especially important as an issue because of economic opportunities for women in urban areas. While women were paramount in legal suits focused on the freedom of children, fathers, as Cowling also shows, petitioned for their children's freedom as well, either alone or in combination with the mother. It appears that mothers were seen as more effective advocates for their children's freedom because of the force of maternity as an argument in the courts.Laws, criminal court cases, and legal claims of individuals in both countries are combined with elite and popular discourse of the time as primary source materials for this excellent and assiduously researched study. While most women were illiterate, they nevertheless were able to access notaries and utilize the legal system to fight their cause. This comparative study is part of an expanding historiography on the slave experience of abolition and manumission, as well as the importance of gender and motherhood for women of mixed race or African descent. Cowling provides an important new perspective on the impact of gender on the process of manumission and the abolition debate, as well as a more nuanced idea of that process. This book will be of interest to specialists, historians of women and of slavery and race, and anybody with an interest in the period. It will also be an excellent text for graduate and undergraduate classes.