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

The southern female slave owners In this book, the author describes the role of Southern white women in the plantation economy and slave-market system and disputes the belief that they played a passive role in slaveholding. In fact, she contradicts the stories told by some white sympathizers regarding slavery and female slave owners. Author Jones-Rogers examined the testimonials of formerly enslaved people archived by the Federal Writers' Project, and bills of sales of slaves bought and sold by white women. It turns out that 40% of bills of sales from South Carolina in the 18th century were white women buyers, and/or sellers. It focuses on how white women were groomed to become plantation mistresses from girlhood through various social norms and often exacted cruelty and sexual violence onto enslaved people. It dispels the notion that white women were gentler than white men. Slaveholding was a key mechanism for them to build wealth and maintain financial independence from their future husbands, and they skirted losing enslaved people to their husbands through various legal tools. The narratives are strong and clear containing no shortage of appalling stories of the violence and cruelty endemic to southern slavery. Within months of confederates surrender in 1865, enslaved people began placing advertisements in "Information Wanted" and "Lost Friends" columns of southern newspapers. They were searching for their loved ones. These ads described mothers, fathers, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, many of whom were not seen for decades. They wanted to know if they were still alive. The ads were filled with yearning and despair, and often named white women owners as responsible for their separation. The author also looks at the other side of arguments in which the white women and their female descendants wrote remarkably different stories. Interwoven within tales of privileged living, these women constructed narratives that omitted the trauma of separation, loss of self-determination, or brutality of living conditions. In fact, they portrayed themselves and their female forebears as forever sacrificing women. They regarded that slaves should be happy that white southerners freed from the “African savages.” Took comfort in the notion that slavery was "God's own plan" for helping these inferior people, and white women were just following this divine instruction. Many of them opposed abolition, and the white women's economic investments in slavery lay at the heart of such accounts. Information obtained from slave auctions, courtroom documents, the ads from pages of local newspapers, military correspondence, and formerly enslaved people's pension applications provided figurative and literal platforms upon which white slave-owning women paraded their economic ties to the institution of slavery. The author concludes that Southern white women's roles in upholding and sustaining slavery form a larger history of white supremacy and oppression, and through it all, they were not passive bystanders, but they were co-conspirators.