Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E.
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
Yale (New Haven)
2019
OUR SYNOPSIS: Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers provides a vital corrective to gendered narratives of enslavement, demonstrating that white “Slave-owning women not only witnessed the most brutal features of slavery, they took part in them, profited from them, and defended them.” (ix) She argues that these women gained personal freedom in marriages and society by enslaving people. While showing how these women learned to enslave from childhood, she foregrounds the voices of the people they enslaved. Enslaved people’s firm and vivid recollections compellingly support Jones-Rogers’s arguments about gender and slavery.
BIG QUESTIONS:
How do these stories impact your thinking about gender and property rights in the antebellum United States?
How did gender relate to the domestic slave trade?
Did the financial losses enslavers suffered due to emancipation impact them differently based on gender and its relationship to American law?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“When we listen to what enslaved people had to say about white women and slave mastery, we find that they articulated quite clearly their belief that slave-owning women governed their slaves in the same ways that white men did; sometimes they were more effective at slave management or they used more brutal methods of discipline than their husbands did.” (xvi)
PRIMARY SOURCES:
Henry Watson, Narrative of Henry Watson, A Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1848), [see especially page] 23, https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/watson/watson.html.
BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:
Women’s involvement in the domestic slave trade, Baltimore a nexus of this trade (see especially Chapter Four and Chapter Six).
