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David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas, Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2004, xi + 329 pp.
Building on the success of More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (1996), their edited volume of essays on free and enslaved black women, David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine have collected another impressive set of essays analysing the lives of women in slave-based societies from across the Americas in their new, and in many ways complementary, volume. This remarkably balanced set of articles discusses women's lives in a wide range of geographic settings, from Antigua west to New Orleans and from Kentucky south to Brazil; in rural and urban settings; and under a variety of imperial regimes, including Spanish, French, British and US. Comparisons among the conditions of free women of colour are further enhanced by the chronological span of this book, beginning in the seventeenth century and continuing to the middle of the nineteenth.
The breadth of coverage permits the reader to consider the lives and experiences of women of colour and, even more, to...