Stephanie Jones-Rogers, "They Were Her Property White Women as Slave Owners in the American South"

Recorded on January 29, 2020, this "Authors Meet Critics" panel featured a discussion of "They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South," by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Jones-Rogers was joined by Bryan Wagner, Associate Professor in the Department of English, UC Berkeley; and Leslie Salzinger, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley.

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. 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.

"They Were Her Property" foregrounds the testimony of enslaved and formerly enslaved people and puts their reflections into conversation with other narrative sources, legal documents, and financial records in order to show how white women's pecuniary investments in the institution shaped their gender identities and to situate them at the center of 19th century America's most significant and devastating system of economic exchange. As a whole, this book offers more expansive and differently gendered understandings of American slavery, the trans-regional domestic slave trade, and nineteenth-century slave markets.

Learn more at https://matrix.berkeley.edu​.