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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

White Female Power Through Brutality

Jones-Rogers ultimately presents an exploration of female power. She chronicles the ways in which white slave-owning women were able to navigate 19th century southern society and find new identities of power and authority. Her book seeks to prove the level of power and authority these women possessed and the active roles they played in demonstrating that power. Slave-owning women were only able to reach these exalted heights through their conscious and unremitting devotion to the brutalization of enslaved women.

Jones-Rogers provides countless examples of the ways in which southern slave-owning women disregarded the humanity of enslaved people in their attempts to maintain their positions of authority. She classifies these examples as violence. The appropriation of enslaved women’s breast milk speaks to the brutality of these women. This dehumanization of enslaved mothers, through the treatment of their bodies as machines and their milk as goods, is referred to as “maternal violence” that results in the exploitation of enslaved women for white female empowerment. Jones-Rogers also provides examples of the physical violence both tolerated and perpetuated by slave-owning women as they attempt to navigate the brutal institution of slavery in the same management styles of slave-owning men. By implementing the slave management styles of men, these slave-owning women adopted a system rooted in the beating and killing of enslaved people for the purposes of order and control.

All of this supports the main themes of Jones-Rogers’ book: that white slave-owning women, far from being bystanders to the brutality of slavery, were active participants driven by the same hunger for profits and financial prosperity as their male counterparts. This flies in the face of much of the historical scholarship concerning white women and slavery, which relies on narratives shaped in the aftermath of emancipation that seek to exonerate all slave-owners but particularly female slave-owners.

The Burden of Civilization as a Justification for Slavery

The burden of civilization was claimed by white southern Americans as a justification for slavery. Rooted in racist beliefs of white superiority and African inferiority, this idea touted a belief in the power of civilization to save the souls of enslaved people and provide a path towards salvation. This burden was taken on by the white southerners who disciplined and brutalized enslaved people in the name of civilization. Jones-Rogers documents the use of this justification by white slave-owning women who sought to avoid condemnation for their active roles in the perpetuation of slavery.

The use of the word burden implies the carrying of a heavy load. White southerners believed that enslaved people only benefitted from the institution of slavery. They victimized themselves as the representations of true suffering. Jones-Rogers highlights examples of slave-owning women promoting this belief in the aftermath of the Civil War. She provides primary sources of letters alluding to the burdens faced by white slave owners. These examples exemplify the level of entitlement that pervaded white slave-owning society. By believing in God’s calling to take up this burden, slave owners gave themselves permission to disregard the needs and desires of the enslaved people they owned. This dehumanization led to the violent abuse of enslaved people at the hands of white slave owners and preserved the institution of slavery.

Much of this is rooted in the imagery of the white southern woman as a genteel model of Christian charity. By recasting slavery as a product of white Christian generosity toward African Americans, whom they believe cannot take care of themselves, southerners sought to further exonerate themselves in the years and decades following the Civil War.

The Weaponization of Female Victimization Against African Americans

Through her investigation of the unique role white women played in the institution of slavery, Jones-Rogers emphasizes the ways in which white women used their own victimization as tools to control enslaved people. Although Jones-Rogers does examine the similarities in the slave management styles of slave-owning men and women, she also explores how white women created new ways of asserting their power that appealed to their femininity and maternal reputations.

These slave-owning women would victimize themselves in attempts to gain sympathy and economic benefits and, in the process, would contribute to the further brutalization of enslaved people. In the aftermath of the Civil War, former slave-owning women sought to coerce their former slaves to continue serving them. Unable to maintain control over the freed adults, these former slave owners took advantage of unsuspecting freed children. When confronted by the freed parents of these children, these former slave owners would call upon their maternal reputations to convince judges of their own innocence and benevolent intentions. These women weaponized their femininity to separate freed families and to maintain their own selfish desires.

This tactic would persist in different forms in the South for decades, as Black men were framed as sexual threats to white female purity. This racist narrative lay at the heart of the 1915 film Birth of the Nation, which almost singlehandedly led to a resurgence of the long-dormant Ku Klux Klan. Claims of white female victimhood also undergirded the 1955 murder of Black 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi at the hands of two white men. Till was accused of merely flirting with a white woman, though even that relatively innocent action is in dispute.