A review by jollene07
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

5.0

What a phenomenal, ground-breaking, and painful read! Author Stephanie Jones-Rogers puts together a mind-blowing amount of research to demonstrate white women’s direct investment, engagement in the institution of slavery. “If we acknowledge that white women stood to personally and directly benefit from the commodification and enslavement of African Americans, we can better understand their participation in postwar white-supremacist movements and atrocities such as lynching - as well as their membership in organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. Southern white women’s roles in upholding and sustaining slavery from part of the much larger history of white supremacy and oppression. And through it all, they were not passive bystanders. They were co-conspirators.”
🔶Special note to birthworker sisters to see chapter on the role of white women in the particular exploitation of enslaved women’s birthing capacity, breastfeeding
🔶 Special note to my sisters fighting to abolish the sex trade to see chapter on the role of prostitution and particular brutality imposed on enslaved women...plus emphasis that “choice” and “consent” were non-existent, similar to today.
This took me weeks to finish because of the brutality from first-hand narratives by formerly enslaved people, but it’s one of the best books I’ve read this year.