Enslaved Women and the Politics of Self-Liberation in Revolutionary North America

This paper examines enslaved women's strategies for gaining freedom through escape. It focuses on enslaved women's escapes from bondage and their concomitant movements to various sites in the Americas from the Revolutionary era through the early decades of the nineteenth century. It also considers the ways in which both enslaved women and slaveholders made sense of the changing political landscape in the late eighteenth-century British Atlantic and African Diaspora.