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A review by carrietmills
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
5.0
This book flips the script on the way we think of white women's relationship to slavery, moving away from the fairytale image of the innocent and naïve to the intentional and often malicious. Chockful of meticulously cited examples, this book holds that owning and subjugating enslaved people was a critical component of antebellum life for monied white women, north and south alike.
While the writing style is academic, it's certainly readable with each example written in its own narrative arc for effect. Examples range in all levels of treatment, but this book is much more than simply highlighting tales of abuse (or its inverse) inflicted by white women on enslaved people. Instead, Jones-Rogers looks at the larger framework and its implications that lead to and support white women as slaveowners.
Here are some secondary arguments covered in this book:
- Antebellum children of slaveholding adults learned at a very early age to maintain the power imbalance through violence and manipulation, and this was considered a critical piece of their upbringing regardless of gender.
- Women often held the rights to enslaved people closely, guarding their "property" from husbands and partnerships through contracts and litigation.
- Some women employed a more "benevolent" approach to slave management likely driven by a better understanding of the financial implication of death or dismemberment. (If a woman owned people but not property, her treatment of the people shifts as they are the center of her prosperity.)
- The idea that slave markets were too brutal for white women is undermined both by their participation in the buying and selling of enslaved people, but also insofar as the level of brutality within a slave market was already met or exceeded in day-to-day violence that white women were already privy to.
Secondary to all of this is the implied lazy patriarchal thinking of older historians who allowed their biased lenses to guide the national narrative for so long. Jones-Rogers doesn't just pull up a few counterexamples, she unearths the costs and benefits to show the economic and self-preserving logic behind it all.
As an aside: As great as this book is for its academic merit, many of the stories will continue to haunt me. I just... Ooof.
While the writing style is academic, it's certainly readable with each example written in its own narrative arc for effect. Examples range in all levels of treatment, but this book is much more than simply highlighting tales of abuse (or its inverse) inflicted by white women on enslaved people. Instead, Jones-Rogers looks at the larger framework and its implications that lead to and support white women as slaveowners.
Here are some secondary arguments covered in this book:
- Antebellum children of slaveholding adults learned at a very early age to maintain the power imbalance through violence and manipulation, and this was considered a critical piece of their upbringing regardless of gender.
- Women often held the rights to enslaved people closely, guarding their "property" from husbands and partnerships through contracts and litigation.
- Some women employed a more "benevolent" approach to slave management likely driven by a better understanding of the financial implication of death or dismemberment. (If a woman owned people but not property, her treatment of the people shifts as they are the center of her prosperity.)
- The idea that slave markets were too brutal for white women is undermined both by their participation in the buying and selling of enslaved people, but also insofar as the level of brutality within a slave market was already met or exceeded in day-to-day violence that white women were already privy to.
Secondary to all of this is the implied lazy patriarchal thinking of older historians who allowed their biased lenses to guide the national narrative for so long. Jones-Rogers doesn't just pull up a few counterexamples, she unearths the costs and benefits to show the economic and self-preserving logic behind it all.
As an aside: As great as this book is for its academic merit, many of the stories will continue to haunt me. I just... Ooof.