They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers (review)

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers contends that southern, white, slave-owning women were as deeply invested in the institution of slavery as anyone in the U.S. South. The women she writes about were not subordinate onlookers, femes covert, or deputy husbands, but rather “mistresses of the market” (xiv) who owned, governed, and traded enslaved people in their own right and reaped the profits of captive labor. In advancing an argument that southern white women were complicit in slaveholding and, by extension, the development of American capitalism, Jones-Rogers’s work contributes in equal measure to the scholarship on both nineteenth-century women and slavery.

In her introduction, Jones-Rogers carefully spells out the target of her investigation: not “the wealthiest single or widowed women” (xi) of the antebellum South, but married women who owned and maintained control over enslaved property. She accesses them using court cases and other legal records, correspondence, and newspapers, but her most important sources are the slave narratives that allow her to recover the voices of those whom slave-owning women held in bondage. The benefit of viewing slave-owning women through the lens of enslaved people is that Jones-Rogers’s study does not focus on only the most elite female slaveholders in the South. Relatively less prosperous but more numerous non-elite slave owners are central to the book.

They Were Her Property is divided into eight topical chapters. Jones-Rogers first traces the process through which young girls, “mistresses in the making” (1), were acculturated into the slave system and learned the power dynamics at play in southern society. It further discusses how slave-owning women came to possess enslaved people of their own. The doctrine of coverture did not function in practice as thoroughly as the written law might suggest, leaving pathways for married women to manage enslaved property independently. And, as Jones-Rogers makes clear, slave-owning women exercised the powers southern society conferred upon masters. They bought and sold enslaved people in private transactions or at slave auctions. They administered punishments, at times with the same brutality as slaveholding men, and extracted forced labor from their enslaved workforces. Jones-Rogers classifies wet nursing as a uniquely exploitive form of skilled labor foisted upon enslaved women at the expense of black infants. Countering Sally McMillen’s work on elite southern white women, she finds the practice of using enslaved wet nurses widespread among non-elite slave-owning women. In the final chapters of the book, Jones-Rogers explains how the South’s slave-owning women navigated the Civil War’s challenges to slaveholding, perhaps by selling their enslaved property or by becoming refugees with them in Texas or other areas deemed safer for the preservation of the slave regime, and how they suffered economically as a consequence of emancipation.

Jones-Rogers offers a bold reinterpretation of the relationship between slavery and slave-owning women in the nineteenth-century South. The prose in They Were Her Property is strong and clear, containing no shortage of appalling stories of the violence and cruelty endemic to southern slavery. Her far-reaching research engages such seldom-studied topics as “ladies auctions” and slave-owning female brothel operators. The sweeping geographical coverage of the book may disguise some regional variations among slave-owning women’s practices, however, and in a few instances, slave-owning men lurking in the examples imply the persistent social constraints their wives confronted.

Still, as Jones-Rogers shows, nineteenth-century slaveholding households were not as patriarchal as has been assumed. The South’s married, slave-owning women were thoroughly enmeshed in the world of slavery and were also the direct economic beneficiaries of its fruits. Their financial ties to bondage as an institution meant that “they were not passive bystanders” to the slave system, but “co-conspirators” in it (205).