Scholars who have studied manumission in early Islamic contexts have usually focused on male freedmen (mawālī). On the other hand, scholars who have studied unfree women have usually focused on women who are still enslaved, most notably “elite” enslaved women such as courtesans and concubine-mothers. These two bodies of scholarship often fail to consider the condition of freedwomen (mawlayāt) or the ways different sources in different genres depict such women. To address this gap, I use the searchable database al-Maktaba al-Shamela to locate all references to the term mawlāh in four different early Islamic texts from four different genres. These texts are ‘Abd al-Razzāq al-Ṣan‘ānī’s (d. 211/827) legal compendium, al-Muṣannaf; Muḥammad ibn Sa‘d’s (d. 230/845) biographical dictionary, al-Ṭabaqāt al-Kubrā; Muḥammad ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī’s (d. 310/923) Quranic exegesis, Jāmi‘ al-Bayān, and al-Ṭabarī’s annalistic history, Tarīkh al-Rusul wa-al-Mulūk. In ‘Abd al-Razzāq’s text, mawlayāt figure in disputes about inheritance, manumission, marriage, and adultery. They often seem to function as “tricky” hypothetical legal cases, highlighting their liminality and the difficulty of navigating their intersectional legal status as freedwomen, wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters. On the other hand, both Ibn Saʿd’s Ṭabaqāt and al-Ṭabarī’s Tārīkh focus on the stories of a few famous mawlayāt from the time of the Prophet Muhammad, most notably the wetnurse Umm Ayman, the midwife Salmā, and the enemy messenger Sārah. In their depiction of other mawlayāt, both Ibn Sa’d and al-Ṭabarī highlight how they participated in their master’s households by performing the intimate tasks of mothering and caretaking, as well as how they forged links between different households as wives, mothers, and go-betweens. However, Ibn Sa’d mentions more than twice as many mawlayāt as al-Ṭabarī, suggesting that mawlayāt figured more prominently in elite Hijazi society than in the grand political and military events that capture al-Ṭabarī’s attention. Finally, al-Ṭabarī’s tafsīr only mentions a few mawlayāt, and these appear as transmitters who gain their authority through their ties to prominent companions such as ‘Ā’isha and Ibn ‘Abbās. Ultimately, these sources present mawlayāt differently, which allows us to discern not only the various roles these women played in early Islamic society, but also the different attitudes, assumptions, and concerns different authors working in different genres held about them.