Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World.

Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World. Edited by Pamela Scully and Diana Paton. (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 376. Paper, $23.95, ISBN 0-8223-3594-8; cloth, $84.95, ISBN 0-8223-3581-6.)

Pamela Scully and Diana Paton have gathered essays covering much of the Atlantic world and a broad range of topics in this thought-provoking book. Spanning experiences from the Americas to the Caribbean to West and South Africa from the middle decades of the nineteenth century to the early part of the twentieth, each essay focuses on some aspect of abolition and emancipation in a particular time and place. Together, they raise important questions about emancipation as a gendered experience, asking in one fashion or another about the ways in which women's experiences and understandings compared with men's, about the ways the transition from slavery to freedom transformed meanings of masculinity and femininity, and about the cultural, social, and political implications of those changes.

The book is divided into three parts: citizenship; families, land, and labor; and the public sphere. Each essay focuses on one geopolitical unit, whether it be colony or state. Only in the introduction do the editors attempt to ask about similarities and differences across cultures and politics; they acknowledge that the work of generalizing is preliminary. However, contributors to the volume claim that everywhere gender is central to understanding the meaning of emancipation. In many cases, women who had been slaves continued to be subordinated after they were freed due to intensified racism on the part of those who had controlled their labor and to new definitions of masculinity and patriarchy accepted by men of their own communities. Throughout, the essays offer instances of women's resistance, first to slavery and then to limits on the promise of liberation. The volume contains an extensive bibliographic essay of both general works and those addressing particular places, in English and other languages, focusing on women and gender, abolitionism and emancipation.

Building on the concept of an Atlantic world, the essays suggest that in spite of local differences, "the transformation and restabilization of gender relations and identities was a key component of the process" of emancipation. The editors claim that "the transition from slavery to regimes more compatible with free wage labor ideologies was crucially dependent on the gendered organization of 'free' labor," in part because of "claims to masculine entitlement" from military action ending slavery and "abolitionist and liberal assumptions that the individual freed from slavery was male" (p. 1). The essays themselves reinforce these concepts through their attention to ideas about work and citizenship, men's claims to authority as heads of household, and emerging ideologies of public and private. In every case, the outcome of these debates was contested as women in the process of emancipation sought to claim a place for themselves in the emerging new order.

Scully and Paton have brought together essays that address questions at the cutting edge of scholarship. While the quality of individual essays is a bit uneven, overall the collection is a significant contribution to scholarship. The book's ambitious scope offers historians of the United States much to consider regarding what was specific to this country and what was inherent in emancipation itself, embedded as it was in liberal--and masculinist--thought.

MARLI F. WEINER

University of Maine