Between 1617 and the 1850s, as many as a million white women were enslaved in Plantation America: as house servants, sex slaves, field hands, bar maids, unwilling wives and laundresses. If any of these women could be made to take the slightest tan they might be passed off as mixed and therefore black, which would consign them to a full lifetime of bondage. Within this book are the stories—ranging from fragmentary to epic—of Caucasian and mixed-race women, brave women who made their break for freedom in a man’s world.