They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

Chapter 3 commences with a look into the turbulent marriage of Maria and Elisha Betts. The Bettses struggled to find common ground around the treatment and authority over the enslaved people inherited by Maria. While Elisha acknowledged Maria’s legal rights of ownership, he frequently complained about Maria’s outright refusal to let Elisha discipline her enslaved people however he wanted. This discord in their relationship ultimately led to Elisha’s abandonment of Maria and her pursuit of a divorce.

Jones-Rogers goes on to explore the management and discipline of enslaved people under the ownership of slave-owning women. Although enslaved people rarely referred to female owners as “master,” they described them as formidable disciplinarians who behaved similarly to male slave owners in many ways. Through her examination of firsthand accounts, Jones-Rogers learned “that mastery did not always involve brute strength or physically violent methods of discipline” (60). Despite these accounts, historians claimed that women, without the physical strength to overpower an enslaved person into submission, cannot be classified as “masters” in the same sense as their male counterparts. However, Jones-Rogers cites research that contradicts historians’ attempts to differentiate between the management styles of slave-owning men and women.

Jones-Rogers provides specific personal examples of the various ways “married women understood, articulated, and asserted their power as slave owners and masters” (64).