They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers (review)
- They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Only a handful of books are published each year that promise to help elevate our national consciousness to topics that should immediately command the attention of every citizen. Stephanie E. Jones-Roger's They Were Her Property is one of these books. Correcting generations of previous scholarship, Jones-Rogers carefully demonstrates that white women slave owners were not oppressed or even half-hearted participants in the peculiar institution. Rather, these "mistresses of the market" (xiv) not only owned a sizable share of human beings in their own right but also served as cunning businesswomen, slave traders, and even violent disciplinarians.
By mining sources like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) slave narratives and legal documents related to property ownership—sources generally underutilized [End Page 135] in previous scholarship on the subject—Jones-Rogers deftly asserts that elite white women wielded a great deal of power in matters concerning race and mastery. Above all, she writes, "these women's fundamental relationship to slavery" was "a relation of property, a relation that was, above all, economic at its foundation" (xiii). Indeed, mistresses governed, possessed, lorded over, and ruled enslaved people, from early childhood until their deaths, precisely because their wealth and their privilege depended on it.
They Were Her Property walks the reader through the training for mastery from the time of infancy, a poignant reminder of Nell Irvin Painter's work on the psychological importance of early dominance and discipline within slave societies. Jones-Rogers shows that child "mistresses" were often gifted and willed enslaved people upon marriage, death, and other major life events.
Feme covert, the legal principle by which women's civil identity became "covered" by their husbands', has led previous historians to underestimate the numbers of women slave owners. In contrast, Jones-Rogers convincingly argues that women's slave ownership was widespread. Sons generally inherited land from parents, thus leaving daughters to inherit the other primary source of wealth in the South: the enslaved. Although the question of precisely how many Southern women owned slaves in their own right still needs attention, the book clearly shows that they acted much like their male peers, reducing people to profits and destroying families to make a dime. Some of Jones-Rogers's most interesting points concern the few vignettes of particularly sadistic violence meted out by white women upon the enslaved. Surely, this study will generate a multitude of new dissertations and books on the intricacies of women's slave mastery and violence, as there are multiple threads that obviously could not be tackled in one book but that still deserve sustained scholarly attention.
Interestingly, Jones-Rogers chooses not to engage with much historiography and thus does not often address the lineage of white women historians whose work her research is upending, but take note: the list is long. They Were Her Property persuasively discredits the image of the submissive and pedestaled plantation mistresses in Anne Firor Scott's Southern Lady (1970), in which Scott argues that "women, like slaves, were an intrinsic part of the patriarchal dream," having little in the way of autonomy or choice (176). She also challenges the image popularized by Catherine Clinton in the 1980s, in which slave-owning women remained—again, like the enslaved—oppressed by patriarchy and more powerless than their Northern counterparts, due in part to their lack of legal identity. To some extent, it even complicates Stephanie McCurry's work on nonplantation yeomen women, who owned a few slaves and whom McCurry depicted as nearly as submissive and oppressed as elite mistresses.
Jones-Rogers actually sharpens some of the claims of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who wrote in 1988 that although plantation mistresses undoubtedly suffered from the restraints of patriarchy, they were ultimately still members of an ultrawealthy, elite ruling class and thus had no reason to oppose slavery (Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women in the Old...
