This presentation investigates how the gradual move towards abolition upended the gendered and racial contours of the domestic realm, particularly concerning the enslavement of sexually vulnerable East African women in early twentieth century Iran. Elite Iranian women often requested or received black female slaves as a part of their marriage dowry, establishing a gendered dynamic where the ownership of a slave woman established one’s full womanhood at the cost of another's. Through a textual, visual, a spatial analysis of mediated sources, this presentation explores the costs of gendered labor during this period. The early twentieth century was the last period to see such exchanges of slaves within the domestic sphere, as legislated manumission of slaves in 1929 rendered slavery illegal within Iran. During this period, notions of normative gender roles fluctuated. Various members of society, including progressives, intellectuals, clerics, and elites debated how to build an ideal society free of slaves, while enslaved women continued to occupy marginally visible spaces in most elite homes. While scholars of gender in modern Iran have attributed the shifts away from polygamous to monogamous family structures to increased Westernization and contact with Europeans, this presentation argues that the diminishing presence of foreign enslaved women served as a critical factor. In the final decades of legal slavery in Iran, debates around abolition involved significant challenges to normative gender roles. Most enslaved peoples were female domestics, often serving as nannies or cooks while also being sexually vulnerable to their masters. The womanhood of free, non-black women, depended upon their management of the household and their ability to relegate chores to enslaved women. The abolition of slavery, then, required a restructuring of gender roles within the home. Instead of aspirational femininity resting upon the ownership of slaves as status symbols, women as caretakers, proper housewives, and diligent mothers became the norm. This newly articulated form of womanhood effectively erased the roles of black women who had been forcibly enslaved from East Africa and brought to Iran via land or sea routes. Through an examination of women’s mothering guides, private family photographs, sale contracts, memoirs and residential spaces and their floor plans, this presentation explores the value of gendered labor and demonstrates the gradual marginalization of enslaved women.