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Rio de Janeiro, 1845: Inácia, an enslaved woman, gives birth to triplets, attended by a white doctor at the request of her slaveholder. All her babies die during their first night. Havana, 1854: a formerly enslaved mother, Dolores Justiniani, petitions the authorities on behalf of her enslaved son, Narciso, to remove him from a rural plantation where he is being subjected to severe physical punishments. Texas, late antebellum era: Rose Williams' mistress threatens her with a 'whipping' if she does not bring forth 'portly children' with an enslaved man, Rufus, whom she dislikes. Rose relents and bears Rufus two children before leaving him after emancipation. These brief snapshots of the lives of women living in different Atlantic slave societies reflect the diversity and complexity involved in mothering under slavery. They underscore, first and foremost, the loss, abuse, and exploitation their protagonists experienced, but they also suggest their resilience and determination in seeking to practise motherhood on their own terms, even under the most painful of circumstances. The stories come to us from different historical moments and spaces, yet their compelling common elements also suggest a rich potential for thinking about motherhood and slavery in connected, comparative, and transnational ways. The articles in this collection, and the companion issue of Slavery & Abolition, together undertake this important task. 1 The articles in each special issue were originally presented at three conferences held by the 'Mothering Slaves' research network in the United Kingdom and Brazil in 2015 and 2016. 2 The network brought together scholars working on motherhood, the care of children, and childlessness in slave societies across the Atlantic World, as well as in medieval Europe, while other participants offered comparative perspectives on motherhood in nonslave settings. A key goal of the network was to engage with the extensive scholarship on the social history of slavery produced in recent decades in Brazil, the Americas' largest and longest-enduring slave society. Historians based both in Brazil and internationally, some of whose work is showcased in these two special editions, are now turning their attention to the intertwined history of gender and slavery, offering important comparative insights.

This article demonstrates how both the agency of women of colour and a particular set of ideas about femininity and maternity played an important part in shaping the ending of slavery in the city of Rio de Janeiro. It does so through the prism of untapped municipal documentation, exploring initiatives taken by the city council both to abolish slavery by emancipating mainly women and to shape the city's first generation of fully free working families by founding schools and charitable institutions. In enacting these measures, councillors found themselves debating not only the meanings of freedom, but the meanings of ex‐slave womanhood. Their discussions reflected both the long‐term development of ‘free womb logic’ in Brazilian slavery and emancipation, and tendencies by the 1880s abolitionist movement to make emotive, ‘feminised’ appeals for elite women to sympathise with enslaved mothers. The article explores how women of colour used elite discourses about freedom, maternity and womanhood in order to achieve freedom, but also contested and reshaped them as they sought to bring their own lived meanings to freedom.