Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South.

Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. By Stephanie M. H. Camp. Gender and American Culture. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. xiv, 206. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8078-5534-0; cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2872-6.)

In this very readable yet analytically sophisticated book, Stephanie M. H. Camp moves the study of slave resistance far beyond a dichotomous, "either/ or" view: either public or private; either personal or political; either day-today or an extraordinary mass event. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South forwards an original analysis of the kinds of daily resistance that challenged the creation of mastery through control of slaves' movement through time and space. Camp seamlessly integrates a wide array of sources (including legal documents, manuscript plantation records, diaries, letters, and Works Progress Administration and other published slave narratives) into an engaging book that does more than recount women's experiences as slaves in the plantation South. Closer to Freedom reveals how enslaved people could implicitly challenge the power relations of southern slavery through the axes of gender, space, and social interactions.

Camp focuses on the South primarily from the 1830s through the Civil War to analyze the many features of slavery and resistance that were not limited to individual plantations, states, or regions. Accordingly, the book is thematically organized, with each chapter addressing a form of gendered daily resistance to slavery.

Chapter 1 provides a brief and useful overview of slavery in the colonial period and then moves to explore how masters enacted slavery by controlling slaves' movement in place and time. Masters tried to control slaves' whereabouts on and off the plantation, and Camp shows that enslaved women generally had less mobility than their male counterparts. Chapter 2 focuses on truancy as a means by which slaves challenged masters' command over their geographic and temporal locations. Moving to explore social consequences, Camp shows how absenteeism not only created an endemic labor problem for masters but also created a rival geography of space and time that allowed for slaves' construction of familial and personal relations.

Chapter 3 is a fascinating look at slaves' illicit socializing and the significance of enslaved women claiming control of their own bodies for pleasure and enjoyment. Camp recreates enslaved women's participation in secret nighttime slave frolics; the importance of women's clothing and appearance at such social events; and the degree to which slaves' physical socializing was implicitly a challenge to slavery's control of their bodies, space, and time.

Chapter 4 examines enslaved women's possession and display of abolitionist propaganda to explore the political and social significance of bondwomen who nurtured overt opposition to slavery in their homes. Chapter 5 focuses on bondwomen's migrations away from slavery during the Civil War. In this final chapter, Camp deftly shows how this overt rejection of slavery was a clear outgrowth of the spaces for independent action that bondwomen and bondmen had created under slavery.

Without doubt, Camp moves historical analysis beyond agency and resistance to create an in-depth picture of the process of slavery and the way that slaves carved out lives filled with political and personal meaning. Closer to Freedom is an excellent study of bondwomen and a penetrating look at the rival geographies created by enslaved people more generally. It is not a comprehensive study of slave resistance; rather it suggests how we might reconceptualize selected facets of the daily lives of bondpeople. Other scholars would do well to build on Camp's beginnings and continue to investigate the cultures of opposition she has uncovered.

This book would be an excellent choice for graduate and undergraduate classes related to nineteenth-century America; southern history; African American history; slavery; women's history; and courses on the social meanings of space. Closer to Freedom is beautifully written, accessible, and truly enjoyable to read. It will make all readers rethink how we understand women's lives under slavery, how we understand the historical significance of space, and how we conceptualize the process of slavery itself.

SHARON BLOCK

University of California, Irvine