They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

“Slave-owning women not only witnessed the most brutal features of slavery, they took part in them, profited from them, and defended them.” 

This serves as the major premise for Jones-Rogers’s text. She states clearly that slave-owning women were not bystanders in the institution of slavery but co-conspirators who actively worked to profit from and defend it. This runs counter to much of the historical scholarship devoted to this topic, which tends to cast white slave-owning women as entirely subjugate to their husbands and lacking agency with respect to how their enslaved people are treated.

“And when we consider that the enslaved people that women owned before they married or acquired afterward helped make the nineteenth-century scale of southern cotton cultivation possible, the narrative of slavery, nineteenth-century markets, and capitalism as the domain of men becomes untenable.” 

Here, Jones-Rogers rejects the widely promoted understanding of white men as the primary or even sole contributors to the capitalistic growth of the American market. She places women at the center of this growth and attributes women as vital players in the southern cultivation of cotton, the institution of slavery, and the development of 19th century markets. For evidence of this thesis, Jones-Rogers looks to firsthand accounts that show women as active participants in buying enslaved people at slave markets and in devising brutal disciplinary strategies.

“For them, slavery was their freedom. They created freedom for themselves by actively engaging and investing in the economy of slavery and keeping African Americans in captivity.” 

Jones-Rogers refers to what slavery signified for slave-owning women. More than a way of life or tradition, slavery offered white women freedom from restrictive gender roles and empowered women to increase their personal wealth and, subsequently, their personal freedom. Through the subjugation of enslaved people, white women found a path towards greater independence separate from the wealth and control of their husbands.