Abstract

With regard to a petition submitted in 1823 to Ramón Freire by “several mothers of families” to repeal the recently sanctioned abolition of slavery, this paper investigates women slaveholder, through notarial and judicial documentation of the city of Santiago, Chile, in the context of the debates on the end of slavery, between 1811 and 1823. This article, therefore, describes an episode about the refusalthe abolition of slavery and then opens a tentative analysis that situates it considering the complex relationships between commercial practices of slave holding women and enslaved domestic labor (servitude).