Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History: a bold and
searing investigation into the role of white women in the American
slave economy
"Stunning."--Rebecca
Onion, Slate
"Makes a
vital contribution to our understanding of our past and
present."--Parul Sehgal, New York Times
"Bracingly
revisionist. . . . [A] startling corrective."--Nicholas Guyatt,
New York Review of Books
Bridging women's
history, the history of the South, and African American history, this
book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American
slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of
sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic
actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South's slave
market.
Because women
typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often
their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse
to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed
management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used
by slave-owning men. White women actively participated in the slave
market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social
empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of
enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a
narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social
conventions of slaveholding America.
