A trend of scholarship on women in classical Islam has presented the distribution of feminine cultural roles in Abbasid foundational texts as reflecting a double standard based mainly on legal status. Slave women are represented as having access to the public sphere, sexually uninhibited, and engaged in the seduction of men partly through the mastery of poetry and song. Free women are described as confined to the private sphere, austere, pious, and educated in the religious sciences. Scholarship investigating biographical compilations for a better understanding of the cultural roles of slave and free women has nuanced the image of the self-fulfilled slave poetess and/or songstress and the marginalized free woman without, however, calling into question a distribution of women’s cultural roles based on status. This paper revisits a selection of Abbasid biographical compilations namely Al-tabaqat al-kubra, of Ibn Saad (d.230/845), Tabaqat al-shuara of Ibn al-Mutazz (d.296/908), Kitab al-aghani of al-Isfahani (d.356/975), and Tarikh Baghdad of al-Khatib al-Baghdadi (d.463-5/1071) in order to develop an appreciation of the conceptual framework underlying the representation of the cultural roles of slave women. It argues that biographical compilations differentiate between two categories of slave women: the household concubine as a legitimate sexual partner and producer of offspring and the qayna as a public performer of poetry and song. It further contends that this categorization challenges the distribution of feminine roles as one based on status and reflects instead two contemporaneous appreciations of Islamic culture: on the one hand, an exclusive perception of a cultural heritage which accounts only for what it considers as inherently Islamic; on the other a more inclusive vision which accounts for pre-Islamic fields of cultural production such as music and poetry. The argumentation is based on substantiated answers to the following questions: What was the terminology used by biographical compilations in their entries on slave women? What cultural referents legitimized the differentiation between the roles of slave women as concubines and their roles as performers of poetry and song? What does the differentiation between these two categories of slave women tell us about the authors’ understanding of the cultural roles of women slave and free? More generally, how does this differentiation inform us on the interaction between slavery, gender, and cultural legitimacy?