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

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South is a historical nonfiction book published in 2019 by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Based on her prized dissertation, They Were Her Property explores the role white women played in the perpetuation of slavery in the 19th century United States. The book earned the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History and the Merle Curti Social History Award from the Organization of American Historians. They Were Her Property discusses the intersections of race and gender through Jones-Rogers’s analysis. Ultimately, this book offers a compelling argument that white women were not mere bystanders but active co-conspirators in the preservation and development of slavery.

Summary

Jones-Rogers begins her work by reviewing the commonly promoted historical explanations for why white southern women opposed the abolition of slavery. She counters the perspective of white women as ignorant to the harsh reality of slavery in the 19th century southern United States. Rather, she claims that white women profited from slavery and played an active role in its development. Her research is focused on married slave-owning women who worked to maintain their power and authority over enslaved people.

In Chapter 1, Jones-Rogers chronicles the development and education of white women in the South. She describes the rituals and naming practices that transferred ownership of enslaved people and documents the ways in which white women learned slave management techniques.

Chapter 2 explores the transition into marriage and how white women balanced these partnerships with their independent status as slave owners. Jones-Rogers delves into the complications of slave ownership and marriage in Chapter 3 as she investigates the power and identity slave ownership provided young white women.

In Chapter 4, Jones-Rogers presents her findings on the slave market. She discusses the ways white women navigated the slave market astutely. Chapter 5 follows the development of the wet nurse market, which was promoted by white slave-owning women who sought wet nurses to breastfeed their own children. Jones-Rogers describes the dehumanizing aspects of the wet nurse market and its impact on the enslaved women forced to work in it.

Chapter 6 follows Jones-Rogers’s explanation of slave trading and the active role white women played in its development. Chapter 7 journeys through the beginning of the Civil War and the growing tension that threatens to collapse the institution of slavery. Jones-Rogers recounts white women’s struggles to maintain independence and authority under the looming abolition of slavery.

In Chapter 8, Jones-Rogers details the difficult transition experienced by former slave-owning women in the aftermath of the Civil War. Facing poverty for the first time, these women grapple with the loss of the property that once defined them. Jones-Rogers ends her book with an Epilogue that discusses the attempts of these former slave owners to depict themselves as benevolent, innocent bystanders. Jones-Rogers calls upon her audience to confront the economic motives that fueled this allegiance to white supremacy that continues after slavery’s end.