Is the understanding of women's place in history being changed by studies of women and slavery? The results of these volumes, centering on the lives of women in Africa and the Atlantic Americas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are relevant to the broader history of women. The stories told in these pages – of seizure and social mobility, of work of every type at every time of life, of concubinage and male denial, plus pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing – reflect core experiences and conditions of women, rather than exceptions. These experiences of black women offer insights reaching in all directions in time and space. What will it take to articulate the implications of these studies of slavery and women for women's lives more generally?

Many of the 27 chapters in these volumes had their origins in presentations at the Avignon conferences on slavery organized by the co-editor Gwyn Campbell from 2000 to 2004.Footnote ¹ Both volumes begin with a tribute to Suzanne Miers, the second co-editor, detailing her leading role in slavery studies from the 1970s on. The third co-editor, Joseph C. Miller, apparently took the lead in the final stages of publication, as he is the author of both prefaces and the introduction to Volume 1, in addition to his own chapter. Nearly half of the authors are female. Most of the chapters address localized regions – 13 of 15 in Volume 1 (on the eastern hemisphere), 10 of 12 in Volume 2 (on the western hemisphere). For each of the two volumes, nearly two-thirds of the contributions focus on the nineteenth century, one-quarter focus on the eighteenth century, and the others address later, earlier, or longer time periods (so the ‘modern Atlantic’ in the title of Volume 2 does not add much).

Four of the chapters are broad overviews. In Volume 1, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch argues that the conditions of women in Africa grew harder in the nineteenth century, and that colonial regimes abandoned slave women to their own devices; while Martin Klein's transhistorical survey shows the commonality of harems in Africa and Asia. Volume 2 includes two overviews that might have appeared in either volume: Joseph C. Miller's survey of the long-term history of gender and slavery provides a welcome insight into a major study in preparation. Meanwhile, Claire Robertson and Marsha Robinson combine to write a historiographical essay emphasizing that women are still neglected in slavery studies, and calling for more theory and more feminist-based work in slavery studies. They recommend emphases along three axes of slavery for women: in women's rights, the need to get beyond the idea of slavery as simple absence of rights; in women's work, the need to recognize the importance of women's work, recognizing sex work as work; and the need to note that the issues of identity, agency, and citizenship were different for women than for men.

The first volume (on the Old World) is fairly well balanced among African regions (three chapters on West Africa, three on East Africa, three on South Africa, and one each on Madagascar, Mauritius, and North Africa – plus a chapter on medieval Norse slavery of women). The volume presents a wide and overlapping range of topics, based on what can be known of women slaves in a variety of actual situations. Jan-Georg Deutsch provides interesting detail on the slave life-cycle in German East Africa, as reflected in changing prices; George Michael la Rue offers a graphic description of the enslavement of women in Egypt and their suffering during the 1834 plague epidemic; and Elizabeth Gryzmala Jordan's chapter relies on archaeological study of Table Mountain streams to portray the work of washerwomen.

The second volume (on the New World) is a little less evenly balanced. Of the ten monographic chapters, half are on the Caribbean (three on the British part, two on the French), four are on the US, and one is on Brazil. The chapters by Kenneth Morgan and Richard Follett on biological reproduction argue that it was slavery itself rather than women's agency that kept birth rates low and infant mortality high. Mariza de Carvalho Soares traces the gender-based political factionalism among the Mina community of Rio de Janeiro. Myriam Cottias shows the ironic result of emancipation in the French Antilles: since the newly emancipated were generally not married, their children were not ‘legitimate’ and did not gain the rights of citizenship until 1946. Chapters by Henrice Altink and Felipe Smith address literary representations of female slaves.

In the introduction to Volume 1, Joseph Miller makes a brief but trenchant reference to the need for drawing on women's history and slavery studies to provide a ‘viable theoretical framework’ to link and articulate the value of these studies. The lack of such a framework mostly reflects the complexity of theorizing the overlapping hierarchies of gender, enslavement, and race. In the absence of a forceful framework, the laudable work of assembling these monographic and interpretive studies goes ahead, but their marginalization within African studies, slavery studies, and women's history remains unchallenged.

Energetic and arguably important work on women and slavery began in the 1970s. Two key collections presented much of that work; other valuable contributions have appeared in a scattering of venues.Footnote ² Yet the reigning interpretations of history in Africa and elsewhere continue to relegate the gendered dimensions of slavery to the footnotes and to ends of chapters. The same may be said for contemporary social analysis: thus, the program of the fourth conference on Women in Africa and the African Diaspora (WAAD – Abuja, August 2009) appears to include no reference to the heritage of slavery.

The difficulty of theorizing women and slavery is not to be underestimated, but the need for analysis will not go away. Studies of slavery have become a permanent part of historical studies because of the importance of slavery in the modern world. The recurrence of slavery today – and the enslavement of women in particular – make clear that studies of women and slavery will continue to be of interest and importance. Hopefully there will emerge, from those who prepare monographic studies, the articulation of a social theory that will facilitate a forceful analysis of this important topic.