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

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



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 m...