The Power of Their Will is an accessible yet scholarly work that sheds new light on the relatively little-known world of women slaveholders in nineteenth-century Cuba. The succinct style—the text including notes comprises just 115 pages—encapsulates a rich range of social and cultural history research, juxtaposing discussions of travel writings, fiction, and visual sources with work with newspaper advertisements for enslaved runaways and slave sales and various archival materials—particularly wills and claims for the restitution of confiscated property—sourced in Madrid, Havana, and Santiago de Cuba. It offers a more genuinely island-wide approach than do many other studies, exploring the island's east as well as the better-known west. It incorporates some useful insights from Spanish-language Cuban scholarship, less well known beyond the island's shores.The book argues for women's significant, specific role in sustaining slavery in Cuba, as a means of better understanding how this institution functioned overall. Women's slaveholding practices, Teresa Prados-Torreira asserts, shaped the slave system in several ways. Economically, women's impact as slaveholders extended beyond the official legal limits of their ability to hold property. Single and widowed women could become property holders in their own right, while even married women continued to distinguish, for example, between the assets they had themselves brought to their marriages and those brought by their husbands. Women's wills reveal their strong sense of personal power over the fate of their enslaved property—whether they would be sold or freed, separated from family or kept together. These documents were often “the only opportunity they had to leave a record of who they were, even when they were illiterate, as they dictated their last wishes to their executor” (p. 79). Numerous telling examples demonstrate this power to bequeath—even extending beyond the formally enslaved. One wealthy countess spoke volumes when she described a freedman as “mi liberto.” Bequeathing several slaves to him, she “transformed her former slave into a slaveholder” (p. 73). The work with wills shows, too, how enslaved families became pawns in struggles between quarreling spouses. One aggrieved husband, for example, wreaked postmortem vengeance on his estranged wife by freeing most of the family slaves in his will, including her own personal servant (p. 69).In economic terms, the book explores white women's particular dependence on slavery. The book deals well with both the racial privilege and the gendered constraints that, together, structured white women's lives (here, further comparative light might have been shed by focusing more on the women of color—albeit a minority—who also became slaveholders). Prados-Torreira shows how the inability of white middling and upper-class women to earn money independently underpinned much of the social conservatism that (male) contemporaries accused them of. The last chapter reveals this dynamic well, exploring women's petitions to the Spanish government to return slaves confiscated, along with other property, from suspected rebels during the Ten Years' War (1868–78). Such women were caught by the sudden upending of “a society built on the assumption that white women's lives would be . . . protected by their husbands and eased by the work of their slaves” (p. 96). Even though many women “had shared their fathers', husbands', and sons' commitment to the ideals of a ‘free Cuba,’” their pleas for the return of the family slaves when widowed or left behind by their husbands reveal “their inability to survive and feed their families on their own” (p. 87). In one of many poignant examples, a widow with four small children to feed asked for the return of a pregnant, 14-year-old enslaved girl, so that the girl's earnings might sustain the widow's family. The girl's fate was likely wet-nursing, which often involved the separation of enslaved mothers from their own babies.Other sections of the book explore women's significant daily roles in managing enslaved workers, particularly within households. Women's relationship with domestic management and childcare, argues the author, meant they were likely behind many of the dynamics of the slave market, shaping the way enslaved people were advertised, bought, and sold. Some of the best-known abuses against the enslaved were thus likely performed at the instigation of women, such as the sale of enslaved women separately from children or the transfer of urban slaves to plantations as punishment.Moving beyond the city, Prados-Torreira sheds new gendered light on the well-known rituals of slaveholding families' seasonal visits to their rural properties. Women's brief but symbolically important visits to sugar plantations offered opportunities to perform feminine charity toward slaves. Ultimately, this propped up, rather than challenging, slavery as an institution (p. 100). Meanwhile, gendered sensibilities shielded many women—owners and women travelers alike—from the worst horrors of plantation punishments and labor regimes, leaving only men as eyewitnesses. Coffee plantation management had different gendered underpinnings, because cafetales were more likely to be used as long-term residences for slaveholding families. In an inversion of the gendered order of sugar plantation management, some women spent more time on coffee plantations than did their husbands, who traveled for business, and thus women had a more significant managerial role in the lives of coffee slaves.In sum, this is an accessible, illuminating study of women's roles in sustaining slavery during its apogee in Cuba. It will surely find a wide readership, from undergraduate students approaching Cuban history for the first time to specialist historians.