They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

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.

• The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
• The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
• Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas (Gender and Slavery Ser.)
• Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland
• Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation
• Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow
• Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management
• The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
• Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Gender and American Culture)