They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South Paperback – Illustrated, January 7, 2020 by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Description

Author: Jones-Rogers Stephanie E.

Brand: Yale University Press

Edition: Illustrated

Format: Illustrated

Package Dimensions: 24x236x730

Number Of Pages: 320

Release Date: 07-01-2020

Details: Product Description

Winner of Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery 2020 Harriet Tubman Prize

Winner of the Los Angeles Times 2019 Book Prize in History

Winner of the Southern Association for Women’s Historians 2020 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize for the best book in southern women’s historyWinner of the Southern Historical Association 2020 Charles S. Sydnor Award for the best book in southern history published in an odd-numbered yearWinner of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic 2020 Best Book PrizeWinner of the Organization of American Historians 2020 Merle Curti Social History Award for the best book in American social history

A bold and searing investigation into the role of white women in the American slave economy

“Compelling.”–Renee Graham, Boston Globe

“Stunning.”–Rebecca Onion, Slate

“Makes a vital contribution to our understanding of our past and present.”–Parul Sehgal, New York Times

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.

Review
“Taut and cogent . . . .
They Were Her Property joins a tide of recent books—among them, Sven Beckert’s
Empire of Cotton, Edward Baptist’s
The Half Has Never Been Told, Walter Johnson’s
River of Dark Dreams and Caitlin Rosenthal’s
Accounting for Slavery—that examine how slavery laid the foundation of American capitalism.”—Parul Sehgal,
New York Times

“Jones-Rogers is a crisp and focused writer. . . . This scrupulous history makes a vital contribution to our understanding of our past and present.”—Parul Sehgal,
New York Times

“Compelling.”—Renee Graham,
Boston Globe

“Stunning.”—Rebecca Onion,
Slate

“Jones-Rogers brings an unseen world to life”—Parul Sehgal,
International New York Times

“Dissects the unacknowledged ways that white women were avid participants in (and beneficiaries of) the American system of slavery.”—
New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

“Jones-Rogers’s
They Were Her Property delivers an unsparing look at the white women who wielded power “in their own right” as owners of enslaved people”—Amy Murrell Taylor,
Times Literary Supplement

“Shatters the narrative that married white women were passive bystanders in the business of slavery.”—Rodney Brooks,
Washington Post/About Us

“Determination and clarity that will surely shake the field. . . . The most comprehensive attempt so far to capture the range of white women’s agency within the slave system. . . . Bracingly revisionist. . . . [A] startling corrective.”—Nicholas Guyatt,
New York Review of Books

“Herein lies the greatest innovation of Jones-Rogers’s book—to show that the power white women wielded over enslaved people, reflected in horrific violence, extended into the economic structures of slavery. They engaged in brutal acts with the logic of the market in mind. Hers is the first book to isolate white women as economic actors in the slave system, and thus the first to dismantle another long-standing myth about these women—that they simply stood by as men cond