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Like no other work on the subject I am aware of, The Power of Their Will gives the reader the information needed to gain insights into the external lives of Cuban slaveholding women as they went about their prescribed tasks and permissible pleasures.""—D. J. Walker, editor and translator of Manuel Ciges Aparicio’s On Captivity: A Spanish Soldier’s Experience in a Havana Prison, 1896–1898 The Power of Their Will is engaging and draws on evocative examples primarily from traveler’s accounts, notarial records, and petitions for reversals of property confiscations during the Cuban War of Independence.""—Adriana Chira, assistant professor of Atlantic World history at Emory University ""This engrossing and elegantly written study foregrounds the lives, importance, and influence of female slave owners in Cuba in the 1800s. It fills a gap in Cuban, women’s, and slave history that scholars have ignored. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, ranging from fiction, wills, and foreign travelers’ accounts, Prados-Torreira draws a compelling portrait of the largely Creole women who owned and profited from the enslaved. Her nuanced story makes clear the extent to which owning other human beings gave female slave owners power and status even as the patriarchal norms of Cuban society subordinated and limited them. It also reveals the complex relations that existed between the slave mistresses and the enslaved and, in the process, sheds new light on both groups on both a social and intimate level.""—Margaret Power, author of Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, 1964–1973

Like no other work on the subject I am aware of, The Power of Their Will gives the reader the information needed to gain insights into the external lives of Cuban slaveholding women as they went about their prescribed tasks and permissible pleasures. -D. J. Walker, editor and translator of Manuel Ciges Aparicio's On Captivity: A Spanish Soldier's Experience in a Havana Prison, 1896-1898 The Power of Their Will is engaging and draws on evocative examples primarily from traveler's accounts, notarial records, and petitions for reversals of property confiscations during the Cuban War of Independence. -Adriana Chira, assistant professor of Atlantic World history at Emory University This engrossing and elegantly written study foregrounds the lives, importance, and influence of female slave owners in Cuba in the 1800s. It fills a gap in Cuban, women's, and slave history that scholars have ignored. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, ranging from fiction, wills, and foreign travelers' accounts, Prados-Torreira draws a compelling portrait of the largely Creole women who owned and profited from the enslaved. Her nuanced story makes clear the extent to which owning other human beings gave female slave owners power and status even as the patriarchal norms of Cuban society subordinated and limited them. It also reveals the complex relations that existed between the slave mistresses and the enslaved and, in the process, sheds new light on both groups on both a social and intimate level. -Margaret Power, author of Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, 1964-1973

Like no other work on the subject I am aware of, The Power of Her Will gives the reader the information needed to gain insights into the external lives of Cuban slaveholding women as they went about their prescribed tasks and permissible pleasures. --D. J. Walker, editor and translator of Miguel Ciges Aparicio's On Captivity: A Spanish Soldier's Experience in a Havana Prison, 1896-1898 The Power of Her Will shows that white women used slaveholding to consolidate their social status and attain social recognition during the first half of the nineteenth century. The writing is engaging and draws on evocative examples primarily from traveler's accounts, notarial records, and petitions for reversals of property confiscations during the Cuban War of Independence. --Adriana Chira, assistant professor of Atlantic World History at Emory College

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Teresa Prados-Torreira is professor of American history at Columbia College Chicago. She is author of Mambisas: Rebel Women in Nineteenth-Century Cuba.

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