They Were Her Property, Stephanie E. JonesRogers
They Were Her Property, Stephanie E. JonesRogers
5 Rating(s)
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They Were Her Property
White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

Author: Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Narrator: Allyson Johnson

Unabridged: 10 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/19/2019


Synopsis

A bold and searing investigation into the role of white women in the American slave economy.

Bridging women's history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South's slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave-owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.

About Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the winner of the 2013 Lerner-Scott Prize for best doctoral dissertation in U.S. women's history. She lives in El Cerrito, California.


Reviews

Goodreads review by emma on September 20, 2021

This book should be required reading for everyone, but above all for white women. The fact of the matter is that the easiest to swallow form of progressiveness is white feminism, and the ease of indulging in mugs that say "#GIRLBOSS" and T-shirts with RBG's face on them is tempting to many of us. It'......more

Goodreads review by Emily May on July 06, 2020

Enslaved people also remembered slave-owning women giving their children human property, which contradicts historians’ claims that bequests and gifting of enslaved people were practices in which only slave-owning men engaged. A horribly graphic but necessary read, especially for any Americans who......more

Goodreads review by Thomas on September 01, 2022

Important and powerful book about white women who owned enslaved Black Americans during the period of slavery. The book’s depictions of how white women abused the people they enslaved is brutal and helps eliminate the stereotype of white women as helpless and fragile. In reality, white women wielded......more