Conceiving freedom : women of color, gender, and the abolition of slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro

Resource Information

The work Conceiving freedom : women of color, gender, and the abolition of slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Conceiving freedom : women of color, gender, and the abolition of slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro

Title remainder

women of color, gender, and the abolition of slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro

Statement of responsibility

Camillia Cowling

Creator

• Cowling, Camillia

Author

• Cowling, Camillia

Subject

• Antislavery movements -- Brazil | Rio de Janeiro -- History -- 19th century
• Antislavery movements -- Cuba | Havana -- History -- 19th century
• Brazil -- Rio de Janeiro
• Cuba -- Havana
• HISTORY -- Latin America -- General
• Havana (Cuba) -- Race relations | History -- 19th century
• History
• POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Public Policy | Cultural Policy
• Race relations
• Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) -- Race relations | History -- 19th century
• 1800-1899
• SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Popular Culture
• SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Slavery
• SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Women's Studies
• Women slaves
• Women slaves -- Brazil | Rio de Janeiro -- History -- 19th century
• Women slaves -- Cuba | Havana -- History -- 19th century
• Women slaves -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- Brazil | Rio de Janeiro -- History -- 19th century
• Women slaves -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- Cuba | Havana -- History -- 19th century
• SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Anthropology | Cultural
• Antislavery movements

Genre

• History

Language

eng

Summary

"In Conceiving Freedom, Camillia Cowling shows how gender shaped urban routes to freedom for the enslaved during the process of gradual emancipation in Cuba and Brazil, which occurred only after the rest of Latin America had abolished slavery and even after the American Civil War. Focusing on late nineteenth-century Havana and Rio de Janeiro, Cowling argues that enslaved women played a dominant role in carving out freedom for themselves and their children through the courts. Cowling examines how women, typically illiterate but with access to scribes, instigated myriad successful petitions for emancipation, often using "free-womb" laws that declared that the children of enslaved women were legally free. She reveals how enslaved women's struggles connected to abolitionist movements in each city and the broader Atlantic World, mobilizing new notions about enslaved and free womanhood. She shows how women conceived freedom and then taught the "free-womb" generation to understand and shape the meaning of that freedom. Even after emancipation, freed women would continue to use these claims-making tools as they struggled to establish new spaces for themselves and their families in post emancipation society"--

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

N$T

Dewey number

306.3/62082

Index

index present

Language note

English

LC call number

HT1076

LC item number

.C69 2013eb

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

• dictionaries
• bibliography

Series statement

EBL-Schweitzer