This dissertation examines bondwomen's "everyday" forms of resistance to slavery, using plantation records, Works Progress Administration interviews of former bondpeople, nineteenth-century autobiographies of ex-slaves, county and appellate legal material and legislative sources. It finds that women's unorganized acts of opposition primarily addressed the gendered forms of domination they experienced: domination and exploitation of the body and reproductive labor.The first part of this dissertation shows that bondwomen practiced and facilitated truancy, a temporary flight from the plantation which created an endemic problem for plantation efficiency and white authority in the Old South.Chapter one shows that central to the assertion of white mastery was the creation of a geography of containment which, attempting to guarantee obedience to their authority and to ensure plantation efficiency and productivity, regulated black movement in space and time.Chapters two and three demonstrate that slaveholders' efforts at masterly control of black bodies failed to discipline bondpeople. Chapter two looks at gender difference in the practice and punishment of truancy, a temporary escape from the plantation in which women engaged much more frequently than they ran away. Absenteeism was an endemic problem in the Old South and had real and subversive effects on white mastery and on plantation productivity.Chapter three looks at bondpeople's secular hidden institution: the outlaw slave frolic, where they celebrated their bodies. Slave men and women, in shared and in different ways, forged a secret culture of bodily pleasure which opposed the social requirements and economic imperatives of slave society and economy.The second part discusses women's use of their reproductive labor for rebellious ends. Chapter four demonstrates that bondpeople's politics were developed and nurtured within the black family. Enslaved mothers used oral and print culture to reproduce bondpeople's political culture.Chapter five argues that plantation mistresses attempted to use paternalist mastery as a mechanism of social control and to maximize labor efficiency within their households. However, like paternalism in the fields, paternalism within slaveholding households failed to garner obedience as enslaved women resisted labor exploitation and violence at every opportunity.