This is a collection of fourteen original essays on women's experiences of slavery in America, researched and written from gender-and women focused perspectives. These 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. This book is designed to bring attention to the new questions and findings about American slavery that are engendered by today's exploration of the experience and roles of the women generally left invisible, stereotyped, or both, by conventional American slavery history.