They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Abstract

Reviewed by: They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers Tyler D. Parry They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. By Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. xxii, 296. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-300-21866-4.) Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers’s They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South is a groundbreaking work that reorients popular perceptions of slaveholding in American history. Typically viewed through a lens of southern white masculinity, slave owners are often envisioned as landowning white men who dominated chattel bondpeople. Though previous scholarship has occasionally recognized that some white southern women owned enslaved people, such women have often been portrayed as reluctant enslavers who either had to learn the business of enslaving or had to rely on a male relative to guide them. In either case, white men are popularly centered in both the historiography and the popular memory of U.S. slavery. Thankfully, Jones-Rogers shatters this myth with precision. Using an impressive collection of published and unpublished materials, she examines how white women enslavers not only owned black people but also actively participated in every function of antebellum slavery. White women were buyers, sellers, investors, traffickers, and violent disciplinarians. Far from being the passive heiresses who wrote glowingly of their love for enslaved men and women, white women enslavers, Jones-Rogers argues, asserted their rights to [End Page 473] human property. Readers are introduced to various white women who studied the law and contested any man who tried to obfuscate their participation in the antebellum markets. Each chapter reveals the different roles white women played in accumulating personal wealth and expanding the institution. Since slavery was the basis of the southern economy, one can imagine that privileged white children raised in the violence of this antebellum world were conditioned to accept their role as enslavers. Jones-Rogers notes that slave-owning women raised in this system did not simply replicate examples from their elders, as “some children clashed with their mothers over the best way to deal with slaves” (p. 12). They Were Her Property shows that many white women enslavers viewed themselves as autonomous owners who acted independently, relishing their ability to accumulate financial and social capital in a world dominated by aristocratic white men. In chapters 2 and 3, readers are left with little doubt that white women asserted their positions as slave owners and used legal, social, and economic means to secure their autonomy from male relatives. Jones-Rogers marshals various sources to prove that violence was an omnipresent reality for those who were owned by white women. Of course, this violence took many forms, as white women willingly exploited every part of the enslaved laborer’s body. In harrowing detail, Jones-Rogers shows how these enslavers actively advertised the wet-nursing capabilities of the black women they owned, selling these services and profiting from the value of this reproductive function. As reproductive value is often presumed to simply connote the birth of enslaved children, chapter 5 proves that wet nursing was another facet of reproductive violence that commodified black women and secured the enslaver’s profits. Indeed, readers leave with a haunting reminder: just as white women separated enslaved women from their own children, white women simultaneously mocked black women’s roles as mothers by “plac[ing] their own infants at the breasts” of those they owned (p. 122). Jones-Rogers shows how white southern women contributed to the omnipresent violence on antebellum plantations. She uses a vast array of primary sources to prove that white women were not peripheral to the institution of slavery but crucial to its expansion. In looking closely at her chapter titles, one finds they hold a unique feature. Many of them are quotations from the testimonies of the formerly enslaved. This authorial choice exemplifies the book’s unique methodological approach, in that one can read the narratives of formerly enslaved people, specifically those from the often-cited Works Progress Administration (WPA), as evidence for the position of slave-owning white women. Often used to garner...