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  • An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade by Alexandra J. Finley
  • Katherine C. Mooney
An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade. By Alexandra J. Finley. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xvi, 184. $22.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6135-3.)

Alexandra J. Finley’s An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade is designed to stick close to its subjects. Each chapter follows various women: Corrina Hinton, Virginia Isham, Sarah Conner, and Lucy Ann Cheatham, among others. All were at some point enslaved women of color (though their status was often a matter of legal contest and complicated perception), and all had household ties to white men. And not just any white men: they were professional slave traders—Silas Omohundro, Hector Davis, Theophilus Freeman, and John Hagan. Finley’s task is to examine these women’s lives as much as possible on their own terms. She considers them as individuals with distinct experiences that refract varying angles of light on the complexities of enslavement, labor, and capitalism. Finley points out that historians have long been attentive to Theophilus Freeman, the man who sold Solomon Northup in New Orleans. But, she argues, the story of Sarah Conner, who was at various times Freeman’s legal property and his landlady, “sheds more light on the nature of the slave trade than Freeman’s does” (p. 95). Women like Sarah Conner were always working—sewing, cooking, grocery shopping, cleaning, nursing, listening, smiling. Their labor maintained slave traders’ households, their families, their social and business networks, and, in many cases, the jails where people were shaped into commodities. It was female labor that was thus at the heart of the slave trade.

Finley lucidly explicates the distinctions among the economies these women navigated—domestic, reproductive, and sexual—all of them overlapping and underpinning the larger economies of slavery and capitalism. As Finley argues, examining these women’s lives reveals just how intertwined household and market were and how understandings of race and gender made those connections and their often painful consequences seem natural and inevitable. She suggests that her subjects themselves may have found that “their survival depended on their silence about their history in slavery, on skirting difficult issues, and prioritizing the quotidian,” and it is in the quotidian that she grounds her compelling arguments (pp. 124–25). In itemizing and analyzing the types of labor these women performed, she offers evidence of how women’s labor was an omnipresent reality. And that omnipresence made women’s work both an integral part of and a recognized shorthand for a capitalism founded on slavery. No wonder, as she points out, that Hector Davis commissioned banknotes featuring a woman at a spinning wheel alongside Henry Clay; he saw in them the two faces of a modern world he looked to master.

Finley works from traditional sources—the papers of courts and the ledgers of slave traders, mostly in Richmond and New Orleans—but she illuminates them with an expansive and meticulous historical imagination. She brings into [End Page 719] the spotlight the real and vulnerable people who can get lost in the history and historiography of global systems. She considers seriously what it was like to live day to day within those systems, to contribute to them, to resist them, and to survive them. In doing so, she adds significantly to the work of scholars of slavery and capitalism such as Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, a literature in which she explicitly orients herself. But she also continues the work of historians such as Emily Clark, Jessica Marie Johnson, and Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, who have sought to recover women’s experiences and thus alter the stories we tell in fundamental ways. In deftly aligning these two strands of the scholarship of slavery, Finley has done important work.

Katherine C. Mooney
Florida State University
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