They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South Audiobook (Free)

A bold and searing investigation into the part of white ladies in the American slave overall economy.

Bridging women’s history, the history of the Southern, and BLACK history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white ladies in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated financial actors who directly engaged in and benefited through the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved individuals were frequently their primary source of wealth. Not only did white ladies often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they used management techniques which were as effective and brutal as those utilized by slave-owning guys. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and utilized it for financial and interpersonal empowerment. By evaluating the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that causes us to rethink the economics and sociable conventions of slaveholding America.