Slavery and the Economic Lives of Women

Abstract

Slavery and the Economic Lives of Women Emma Rothschild (bio) Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. 320 pp. ISBN 9780300251838 (cl.). Claire Priest. Credit Nation: Property Laws and Institutions in Early America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. 248 pp. ISBN 9780691241722 (cl.); 9780691185651 (ebook). Lorri Glover. Eliza Lucas Pinckney: An Independent Woman in the Age of Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. 344 pp. ISBN 9780300236118 (cl.); 9780300255942 (ebook). Christine Walker. Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 336 pp. ISBN 9781469658797 (cl.); 9781469655277 (ebook). The domestic institution of slavery was a condition of women, men, and children. To be enslaved, for women and girls, was to be subject to the violence of forced reproduction, and, to an extreme extent, to sexual assault. It was to be confined, even more than the male enslaved, in the private space of the household or the home. To be the owner of the enslaved, for women, was to be subject to “the fatal poison of irresponsible power,” in the words that Frederick Douglass used to describe one of his many “mistresses.”1 The power of female owners or mistresses has been an anomaly in the historiography of American slavery. The “logic of female dependence” is part of the established history of the antebellum South, in which it was men who “had borne overwhelming responsibility for slavery’s daily management and perpetuation.”2 The dominion of mistresses called into question an enduring presumption that women were the objects and not the owners of power; or that they were (relatively) compassionate and un-violent, as a matter of occupational or evolutionary or neurobiological circumstance. The new historiography of women slave owners is a challenge to these reassuring stories. It shows that women were closely involved in the management of slavery and in the ownership of slaves. A history of economic life that has space for women—that takes seriously the sources in which women’s inheritance, credit, and market transactions were recorded—can even suggest that slavery was itself a peculiarly female institution. Women had a “deep economic interest and investment” in slavery, Stephanie Jones-Rogers writes in her remarkable book They Were Her Property: White Women as [End Page 157] Slave Owners in the American South; their relationship to property in the enslaved was “economic at its foundation” (xiii, xvii). In the decades preceding the end of slavery in the United States, women were actively involved in every aspect of the slave economy. Jones-Rogers is concerned, in particular, with non-elite women, the owners of—and traders in—small numbers of the enslaved. She draws on an impressive range of legal sources, including local Chancery Courts, and on a single, immense, complex source in the interviews with former slaves, some of them centenarians, conducted by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. The book is a depiction of the “financial knowledge” of the enslaved themselves and of their observations of the women by whom they were owned (97). The “liquidity” or “mobility” of property in the enslaved is at the heart of the story. The enslaved could be sold, “realized,” endowed, or given as gifts. Wealthy owners gave slaves to their infant daughters and as wedding presents. Slaves were sold to pay for a “daughter’s wedding dress”; one former enslaved person said of his owner that whenever “she wanted a dress, she would sell a slave” (18, 142). The possibility of being sold, which loomed over the life of every enslaved person, was an opportunity for the owners of slaves. One of the most dramatic moments in They Were Her Property is a story from 1865, after the end of slavery. Betty Jones recalled that her grandmother “ran seven miles to her mistress’s home,” “looked at her real hard,” and said, “You can’t put me in yo’ pocket now!” (183). The institution of coverture in Anglo-American common law, in which women at marriage were deemed to be “covered over” by their husbands, was a...