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A review by thechanelmuse
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
5.0
"The regime of slavery could not have been sustained if the power, authority, and violence that characterized it had belong to elite white men only. It required modes of flexible power."
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South spotlights the role and depravity of white women as co-conspirators of owning and trading enslaved Black people amongst other heinous things, rather than a role as "passive bystanders" during chattel slavery and its aftermath on American soil.
Although this book isn't long in page count (320), it's dense in information and heavy in description, especially the (first-hand) stories throughout. The eight chapters and epilogue focuses on a variety of things:
• the acquirement of enslaved Black people (as gifts on birthdays, baptisms, holidays, wills, and just because) for young white girls, affirming their ownership role from birth that was passed down by their parents
• the business management and trading practices of enslaved Black people by white wives as separate possessions (property rights) within their marriage from their husband's human property and debt
• the champion of sexual labor (sex farms) as a "natural reproduction of the enslaved labor force" to combat the abolishment of human cargo importation in 1808 and generate new ways income for white women
• further human trafficking of enslaved Black women for sexual labor like brothels where white women were madams
• newfound practices to upkeep the leadership of white women right after chattel enslavement was abolished leading to Jim Crow
This book needs to be required reading to emphasize the other half of the scope that built and fueled the wealth of white Americans and American capitalism itself to reach its status today through the bondage, human trafficking, forced labor, (sexual) violence, torturous punishment, and domestic terrorism of enslaved Black Americans instituted and sanctioned by the United States government.
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South spotlights the role and depravity of white women as co-conspirators of owning and trading enslaved Black people amongst other heinous things, rather than a role as "passive bystanders" during chattel slavery and its aftermath on American soil.
Although this book isn't long in page count (320), it's dense in information and heavy in description, especially the (first-hand) stories throughout. The eight chapters and epilogue focuses on a variety of things:
• the acquirement of enslaved Black people (as gifts on birthdays, baptisms, holidays, wills, and just because) for young white girls, affirming their ownership role from birth that was passed down by their parents
• the business management and trading practices of enslaved Black people by white wives as separate possessions (property rights) within their marriage from their husband's human property and debt
• the champion of sexual labor (sex farms) as a "natural reproduction of the enslaved labor force" to combat the abolishment of human cargo importation in 1808 and generate new ways income for white women
• further human trafficking of enslaved Black women for sexual labor like brothels where white women were madams
• newfound practices to upkeep the leadership of white women right after chattel enslavement was abolished leading to Jim Crow
This book needs to be required reading to emphasize the other half of the scope that built and fueled the wealth of white Americans and American capitalism itself to reach its status today through the bondage, human trafficking, forced labor, (sexual) violence, torturous punishment, and domestic terrorism of enslaved Black Americans instituted and sanctioned by the United States government.