Discovering the women in slavery : emancipating perspectives on the American past / edited by Patricia Morton.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 313-317).

Acknowledgments / Patricia Morton -- Misshapen Identity: Memory, Folklore, and the Legend of Rachel Knight / Victoria E. Bynum -- In Remembrance of Mira: Reflections on the Death of a Slave Woman / Carolyn J. Powell -- The Civil War's Empowerment of an Appalachian Woman: The 1864 Slave Purchases of Mary Bell / John C. Inscoe -- The Mistress and Her Maids: White and Black Women in a Louisiana Household, 1858-1868 / Wilma King -- The Divided Mind of Antislavery Feminism: Lydia Maria Child and the Construction of African American Womanhood / Margaret M. R. Kellow -- Prudence Crandall, Amistad, and Other Episodes in the Dismissal of Connecticut Slave Women from American History / David Sheinin -- "The Fortunes of Women in America": Spanish New Orleans's Free Women of African Descent and Their Relations with Slave Women / Kimberly S. Hanger --

"If I Can't Have My Rights, I Can Have My Pleasures, And If They Won't Give Me Wages, I Can Take Them": Gender and Slave Labor in Antebellum New Orleans / Virginia Meacham Gould -- Religion, Gender, and Identity: Black Methodist Women in a Slave Society, 1770-1810 / Cynthia Lynn Lyerly -- The Struggle to Achieve Individual Expression through Clothing and Adornment: African American Women under and after Slavery / Patricia K. Hunt -- "At Noon, Oh How I Ran": Breastfeeding and Weaning on Plantation and Farm in Antebellum Virginia and Alabama / Marie Jenkins Schwartz -- Behind the Mask: Ex-slave Women and Interracial Sexual Relations / Helene Lecaudey -- Mistresses, Morality, and the Dilemmas of Slaveholding: The Ideology and Behavior of Elite Antebellum Women / Marli F. Weiner -- The Diversity of Old South White Women: The Peculiar Worlds of German American Women / Lauren Ann Kattner.

Discovering the Women in Slavery is a collection of fourteen original essays on women's experiences of slavery in America, researched and written from gender- and women-focused perspectives. The essays discuss not only slave women but also plantation and slaveholding mistresses and free women of color, in contexts ranging from the colonial era to the Civil War South.