A restoration of the agency and influence of free African-descended women in colonial Mexico through their traces in archives “A breathtaking study that places free African-descended women at the nexus of questions about religion, commerce, and the law in colonial Mexico. Danielle Terrazas Williams has produced a dazzling and important contribution to the history of women, family, race, and slavery in the Americas.”—Sophie White, author of Voices of the Enslaved The Capital of Free Women examines how African-descended women strove for dignity in seventeenth-century Mexico. Free women in central Veracruz, sometimes just one generation removed from slavery, purchased land, ran businesses, managed intergenerational wealth, and owned slaves of African descent. Drawing from archives in Mexico, Spain, and Italy, Danielle Terrazas Williams explores the lives of African-descended women across the economic spectrum, evaluates their elite sensibilities, and challenges notions of race and class in the colonial period.

The Capital of Free Women' illuminates the history of how free African-descended women accumulated capital in seventeenth-century Mexico. While some women still labored as slaves, a new demographic began to emerge: free Black women of means. Free women in central Veracruz, sometimes just one generation removed from slavery, purchased land, ran businesses, served as influential matriarchs, managed intergenerational wealth, and even owned slaves of African descent.0 Using the notarial archives of the region, as well as royal edicts and ecclesiastical sources, Danielle Terrazas Williams explores the lives of Black women across the economic spectrum, evaluates their elite sensibilities, and challenges notions of race and class in the colonial period. More broadly, she asks readers to consider how colonial institutions imagined marginalized people and how race and gender influenced how people navigated imperial demands and religious expectations.

This book argues that the position of women in late medieval and early modern Europe was relatively strong. This, van Zanden, De Moor, and Carmichael argue, is evident from the fact that marriage was usually based on consensus, implying that women had a clear say in their marriage. The authors analyze the medieval roots of this European Marriage Pattern, demonstrating that it was much stronger in northwestern Europe than in the Mediterranean. That women had considerable agency was one of the factors behind the rise of Europe in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution. This had huge consequences for the average age of marriage (which was very high), fertility (which was restricted by the high age of marriage), human capital formation (resulting in high levels of numeracy and literacy), and labor-force participation by women. However, the authors also explore the negative effects of the European Marriage Pattern, such as the greater vulnerability of these relatively small families, and the large group of single women, subject to external shocks particularly in old age. Special institutions emerged, such as the beguinages, to cope with these pressures. Finally, by comparing these European households with household patterns in the rest of Eurasia, this book puts the European Marriage Pattern into global perspective.

In this book, which has important implications for our vision of the female past, Suzanne Lebsock examines the question, Did the position of women in America deteriorate or improve in the first half of the nineteenth century? Focusing on Petersburg, Virginia, Professor Lebsock is able to demonstrate and explain how the status of women could change for the better in an antifeminist environment. She weaves the experiences of individual women together with general social trends, to show, for example, how women's lives were changing in response to the economy and the institutions of property ownership and slavery. By looking at what the Petersburg women did and thought and comparing their behavior with that of men, Lebsock discovers that they placed high value on economic security, on the personal, on the religious, and on the interests of other women. In a society committed to materialism, male dominance, and the maintenance of slavery, their influence was subversive. They operated from an alternative value system, indeed a distinct female culture.

In the 1960s thousands of poor women of color on the (post)colonial French island of Reunion had their pregnancies forcefully terminated by white doctors; the doctors operated under the pretext of performing benign surgeries, for which they sought government compensation. When the scandal broke in 1970, the doctors claimed to have been encouraged to perform these abortions by French politicians who sought to curtail reproduction on the island, even though abortion was illegal in France. In The Wombs of Women—first published in French and appearing here in English for the first time—Françoise Vergès traces the long history of colonial state intervention in black women’s wombs during the slave trade and postslavery imperialism as well as in current birth control politics. She examines the women’s liberation movement in France in the 1960s and 1970s, showing that by choosing to ignore the history of the racialization of women’s wombs, French feminists inevitably ended up defending the rights of white women at the expense of women of color. Ultimately, Vergès demonstrates how the forced abortions on Reunion were manifestations of the legacies of the racialized violence of slavery and colonialism.

The capital city of a nation founded on the premise of liberty, nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., was both an entrepot of urban slavery and the target of abolitionist ferment. The growing slave trade and the enactment of Black codes placed the city's Black women within the rigid confines of a social hierarchy ordered by race and gender. At the Threshold of Liberty reveals how these women--enslaved, fugitive, and free--imagined new identities and lives beyond the oppressive restrictions intended to prevent them from ever experiencing liberty, self-respect, and power. Consulting newspapers, government documents, letters, abolitionist records, legislation, and memoirs, Tamika Y. Nunley traces how Black women navigated social and legal proscriptions to develop their own ideas about liberty as they escaped from slavery, initiated freedom suits, created entrepreneurial economies, pursued education, and participated in political work. In telling these stories, Nunley places Black women at the vanguard of the history of Washington, D.C., and the momentous transformations of nineteenth-century America.

Local policy in the nation's capital has always influenced national politics. During Reconstruction, black Washingtonians were first to exercise their new franchise. But when congressmen abolished local governance in the 1870s, they set the precedent for southern disfranchisement. In the aftermath of this process, memories of voting and citizenship rights inspired a new generation of Washingtonians to restore local government in their city and lay the foundation for black equality across the nation. And women were at the forefront of this effort. Here Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy tells the story of how African American women in D.C. transformed civil rights politics in their freedom struggles between 1920 and 1945. Even though no resident of the nation's capital could vote, black women seized on their conspicuous location to testify in Congress, lobby politicians, and stage protests to secure racial justice, both in Washington and across the nation. Women crafted a broad vision of citizenship rights that put economic justice, physical safety, and legal equality at the forefront of their political campaigns. Black women's civil rights tactics and victories in Washington, D.C., shaped the national postwar black freedom struggle in ways that still resonate today.