Edited by Gaspar and Hine, this collection puts gender at the center of how slave societies worked. Its premise is that enslavement was never a single experience: men and women lived it differently, and women were exploited for their reproductive capacity as well as for their labor.

That difference extends to resistance. The volume holds that women appear rarely in accounts of revolt because their opposition took less confrontational forms, closer to the inventive daily work of surviving abuse and the denial of their humanity.

Sixteen contributors take up the subject, among them Hilary Beckles, Barbara Bush, David Barry Gaspar, David P. Geggus, Wilma King, Bernard Moitt, Claire Robertson, Susan M. Socolow, and Brenda E. Stevenson. Drew Faust, quoted in the publisher's notice, describes the book as filling a gap for scholars of women, slavery, and African American history.