They Were Her Property

White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

Bibliographic Data

ID4155938
AuthorsWilma King (Emerita, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume107
Issue1
Pages200-202
Publication date2020-06-01
Open AccessYes
TypeREVIEW
Review ofThey Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, Stephanie E Jones-Rogers, 2019
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jaaa077
OpenAlexW3037142769
LanguageEN

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers's They Were Her Property highlights married women possessing property in their own right. “Historians have acknowledged that some southern women owned slaves,” she writes, “but they usually focus on the wealthiest single or widowed women” (p. xi). And “historians,” the author explains as she foregrounds her own work, “rarely differentiate between married women who owned enslaved people in their own right and married women who merely lived in households in which they engaged with, managed, and benefited from the labor” of slaves owned by others (ibid.). These observations suggest that They Were Her Property will fill a historiographical void and create greater balance in the literature by studying southern women who owned, outright, fewer than ten slaves. In the eight-chapter study, Jones-Rogers presents a two-pronged focus. First, she devotes attention to married women who owned others for their sole use, benefit, and enjoyment. Second, she elucidates the women's “fundamental relationship to slavery as a relation of property” and economic interests (p. xiii). Through extensive use of newspaper advertisements, court cases, diaries, census returns, and testimony from former slaves, Jones-Rogers affirms that slaveholding women knew about “the ‘most obnoxious features’” of bondage (p. ix). Moreover, women, like men, bought, sold, punished, separated, and exerted control over their property. The ostensibly softer side of women as benevolent or secretly abolitionist is not evident. Contrary to conventional wisdom, and supported by opinions of the New York Tribune editor James Redpath after an 1859 tour of the South, many southern white women were aware of “negro slavery as it is” (ibid

Census · Historiography · Newspaper · Political science · Population · Property (philosophy · Sociology · White (mutation · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Demography · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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