Description: As If She Were Free brings together the biographies of twenty-four women of African descent to reveal how enslaved and recently freed women sought, imagined, and found freedom from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries in the Americas. Our biographical approach allows readers to view large social processes - migration, trade, enslavement, emancipation - through the perspective of individual women moving across the boundaries of slavery and freedom. For some women, freedom meant liberation and legal protection from slavery, while others focused on gaining economic, personal, political, and social rights. Rather than simply defining emancipation as a legal status that was conferred by those in authority and framing women as passive recipients of freedom, these life stories demonstrate that women were agents of emancipation, claiming free status in the courts, fighting for liberty, and defining and experiencing freedom in a surprising and inspiring range of ways.
Brief description: Terri L. Snyder is Professor in the Department of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. She is the author of The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America (2015).
Review Quotes: '... an exciting and provocative anthology of twenty-four essays that explore both the meaning of freedom and the strategies to obtain it for individual women, mostly of African descent, within slave societies in the Americas or in the immediate post-abolition context.' Karen Y. Morrison, Journal of African American History