Writing in the first decades of the early nineteenth century, a cohort of French women assumed the role of advocates of persons of African descent, the “slaves” referred to in the title of this book. Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves looks at how these women writers pictured themselves, their biological and symbolic fathers, and the real and fictional blacks who appear in their writings. The works by these women are crucial for a full understanding of French and Atlantic history in the revolutionary and postrevolutionary years, a time when the French colonial world was menaced by the re-establishment of slave-holding authority and when class, race, and gender identities were being renegotiated. These unique contributions by women in an era of colonial nostalgia and unresolved triangular trade ambitions allow us to move beyond the traditional boundaries of exclusively male accounts by missionaries, explorers, functionaries, and military or political figures. They remind us of the imperative for ever-renewed gender and feminist research in the colonial archive.