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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://www.vox.com/2019/8/19/20807633/slavery-white-women-stephanie-jones-rogers-1619?fbclid=IwAR0qlOEfqKZyqWgBP1s0DnaDM_Q_pHFC4ScuFUZo87C0twfFivUxK2Btgak">https://www.vox.com/2019/8/19/20807633/slavery-white-women-stephanie-jones-rogers-1619?fbclid=IwAR0qlOEfqKZyqWgBP1s0DnaDM_Q_pHFC4ScuFUZo87C0twfFivUxK2Btgak</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">How white women’s "investment" in
slavery has shaped America today</h1>
By <span class="c-byline__item"> <a
href="https://www.vox.com/authors/anna-north">Anna North</a>
</span> <span class="c-byline__item"> <time
class="c-byline__item" data-ui="timestamp"
datetime="2019-08-19T15:30:00+00:00"> - Aug 19, 2019</time></span></div>
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<p id="9W0zLz">In the American South before the Civil
War, white women couldn’t vote. They couldn’t hold
office. When they married, their property technically
belonged to their husbands.</p>
<p id="NZA0h6">But, as historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers
notes, there was one thing they could do, just as
white men could: They could buy, sell, and own
enslaved people.</p>
<p id="title">In her recent book, <a
href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300218664/they-were-her-property"><em>They
Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in
the American South</em></a><em>, </em>Jones-Rogers
makes the case that white women were far from passive
bystanders in the business of slavery, as previous
historians argued. Rather, they were active
participants, shoring up their own economic power
through ownership of the enslaved.</p>
<p id="FdxOsN">In the past, historians had often based
their conclusions about white women’s role in slavery
on the writings of a small subset of white Southern
women. But Jones-Rogers, an associate professor of
history at the University of California Berkeley, drew
on a different source: interviews with formerly
enslaved people conducted during the Great Depression
as part of the Federal Writers’ Project, an arm of the
Works Progress Administration. These interviews,
Jones-Rogers writes, show that white girls were
trained in slave ownership, discipline, and mastery
sometimes from birth, even being given enslaved people
as gifts when they were as young as nine months old. </p>
<p id="cFSXzZ">The result was a deep investment by white
women in slavery, and its echoes continue to be felt
today. As the <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html">New
York Times</a> and others commemorate the date, 400
years ago, when <a
href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/8/16/20806069/slavery-economy-capitalism-violence-cotton-edward-baptist">enslaved
Africans arrived in Virginia</a>, Vox reached out to
Jones-Rogers to talk about the history of white,
slaveholding women in the South and what that history
says about race, gender, wealth, and power in America
in 2019. Our conversation has been condensed and
edited.</p>
<h4 id="drQLzl">Anna North</h4>
<p id="LaRP9n">Can you talk a little about how this book
came about?</p>
<h4 id="VzouWb">Stephanie Jones-Rogers</h4>
<p id="GGoItE">When I was in graduate school, I was
taking all these different courses and reading all
these books on African American history but also on
women’s and gender history. I was particularly
interested in what these two subfields of history had
to say about white women’s economic investments in the
institution of slavery. What struck me is that they
seemed to be in direct contradiction to each other, in
many respects.</p>
<p id="4Qxqmv">Those historians who explored the
experiences of white Southern women would often argue
that while women had access to enslaved people that
male kin or their spouses may have owned, they were
not directly involved in the buying and selling of
enslaved people — particularly married women weren’t.
</p>
<p id="P0r07o">Conversely, those individuals who
explored the enslaving of African Americans would
often, in fact, say that a formerly enslaved person
talked about having a female owner or talked about
being bought or sold by a woman. And so I asked
myself, what’s the real story here?</p>
<p id="6Jtomk">Were white women — particularly married
white women — economically invested in the institution
of slavery? Meaning, did they buy and sell enslaved
people? </p>
<p id="IbCEjH">I looked to traditional sources where we
might think to find those answers: a white woman’s
diary, a white woman’s letters and correspondence
between family members, et cetera. They mentioned very
sporadically issues related to answering this
question, but there was not this kind of sustained
conversation. So, I said, African Americans are
talking about this. Formerly enslaved people are
talking about this. So, let me look to the interviews
that they granted to these Federal Writers in the
1930s and 1940s. And so when I look to those
interviews, formerly enslaved people were talking
about white women’s economic investments in a variety
of ways consistently, constantly, routinely.</p>
<h4 id="iZ7Oga">Anna North</h4>
<p id="ShstoO">The historians you mention who didn’t see
white women as economically invested in slavery — what
sources were they drawing on and why is there such a
disconnect between those sources and the interviews
with formerly enslaved people that did really delve
into these economic questions?</p>
<h4 id="GsTCJf">Stephanie Jones-Rogers</h4>
<p id="xo96zB">I tried to focus primarily on married
slave-owned women in this book, in large part because
those are the women who many historians of slaveowners
say did not have a direct impact on the economic
institution of slavery. And they say that, in large
part, because of this legal doctrine called coverture.
Essentially, this doctrine says that when a woman who
owns property or earns wages, or has any assets, gets
married, those assets, those wages, that wealth,
immediately becomes her husband’s — their identities
are subsumed into one. </p>
<p id="FwUCHv">Many historians have looked into this
legal doctrine of coverture and seen it as
all-encompassing. [But] scholars who have made this
argument have essentially not examined the voluminous
evidence that appeared in the testimonies of formerly
enslaved people.</p>
<p id="P1IVNt">They also looked to a very small subset
of women: highly literate, very elite white women who
had the time to sit down and jot down their thoughts
about the day. And so they’re missing the vast
majority of those women who owned slaves. </p>
<p id="gh2Wdz">The vast majority of women who owned
slaves owned less than 20. And often, the women that I
talk about in the book owned one or two, no more than
five. So these are the women that were probably not
literate, and if they were literate, they didn’t have
enough time to sit down and write down what was going
on in their day. The vast majority of the women who
owned slaves are missing from the analyses, in large
part because they did not leave documents behind to
tell us how they felt about these things, to tell us
how they were investing in the institution.</p>
<p id="4AfnR1">Formerly enslaved people’s testimonies
about these women are, in many respects, the only
surviving record to document exactly that. </p>
<h4 id="AcWTnD">Anna North</h4>
<p id="e7XZSr">So in looking at those testimonies, what
did you find in terms of the roles that white women
and girls had in slavery, and the way that they formed
their identities through their involvement in slavery?</p>
<h4 id="wKH5t4">Stephanie Jones-Rogers</h4>
<p id="O8OyOa">What I thought was really interesting as
I read much of the scholarship on white slave-owning
women is that so much of it starts when women are
adults. One really wonderful thing about the
interviews of formerly enslaved people is they talk
about white girls. They talk about white infants,
female infants, and female adolescents.</p>
<p id="dRqj0k">So we are allowed into several phases of
white female life through these interviews that have
heretofore been obscured or kind of left out of the
picture. I decided, in order for the second half of
this story, the story of women, to make sense, I have
to start the story at the very beginning, in the early
years.</p>
<p id="39p6FT">So I start the book by talking about how
white slave-holding parents trained their daughters
how to be slaveowners. They give them lessons in slave
discipline and slave management. Some even allow for
their daughters to mete out physical punishments.</p>
<p id="yVw5it">Slave-holding parents and slave-holding
family members gave girls enslaved people as gifts —
for Christmas sometimes, when they turned 16 or when
they turned 21. </p>
<p id="enNpum">There are even accounts of slave-holding
parents and family members giving white female infants
enslaved people as their own. There is one particular
instance of a case, in a court record, where a woman
talks about how her grandfather gave her an enslaved
person as her own when she was 9 months old. </p>
<p id="1Lbfd4">When you think about the fact that their
relationship to slavery, to slave ownership in
particular, begins in infancy, in girlhood, what you
begin to realize is that their very identities as
white girls, as white Southerners, as white women, is
intricately tied to not only ownership of enslaved
people but also the control of enslaved people, the
management of enslaved people. </p>
<p id="Jiu6Gw">The other really important lesson that
their parents, their family members, and even their
girlfriends, cousins, female cousins, and so forth are
also teaching them along the way is that the way the
law is set up, you have this property. And when you
get married, it will, if we don’t do anything about
it, become your husband’s. And, if he is a loser,
you’re going to lose. So, they essentially say, we
have to make sure that does not happen.</p>
<p id="phSYnH">So before these young women get married,
their parents and sometimes female kin and friends
will encourage them to develop legal instruments,
protective measures to ensure that they don’t lose all
of their property to their husbands. These legal
instruments that they develop are very much like
prenuptial agreements today. They’re called marriage
settlements back then, or marital contracts, which
essentially detail not only what property they’re
bringing into the marriage but what kind of control
their husbands can or cannot have over it.</p>
<p id="W04HhT">These women are not stupid. They’re like,
I’m about to get married, the law says that everything
I have is going to be my husband’s. I don’t want that
to happen. What can I do to prevent that from
happening?</p>
<p id="TwuNeb">They are prepared, they are
knowledgeable, and they work with parents and others
who are willing to assist them to develop protective
measures to ensure that the relinquishment of all of
their property wealth and assets doesn’t happen once
they get married. </p>
<h4 id="8SSmPC">Anna North</h4>
<p id="WqxsUE">Going along with that, can you talk about
the ways in which slavery benefited white women and
girls, both economically and socially? </p>
<h4 id="F8qxgF">Stephanie Jones-Rogers</h4>
<p id="celWff">Women cannot do many of the things that
men can do in this period of time. One thing that they
are allowed to do by law, and this is particularly the
case in the South, is invest in slavery. </p>
<p id="yA5RYI">And that’s exactly what they do. Not only
do they inherit enslaved people, but they also go into
slave markets. They buy enslaved people. They’ll hire
them out and they’ll collect their wages. Then they
use those wages to buy more slaves. </p>
<p id="Y0vG9d">They open businesses, and they employ
those enslaved people in their businesses, those
businesses make a profit, they use those profits to
buy more slaves. So they are investing in the
institution of slavery in the same ways as white men
are.</p>
<p id="OXOlTb">The other really interesting thing that I
observed in the interviews with formerly enslaved
people is that white women often owned twice as many
female slaves as they did male slaves. When I would
talk about this with scholars in the field, some of
them would remark, “Oh, that makes sense, because if
women are in the house, they need more female help.”</p>
<p id="3OJ38S">I said, “Okay, yes, that would be
practical,” but what has also been important to
recognize is that these women understood the law.
There are laws on the books, during this period that
ensure whenever a person owns an enslaved woman, if
that woman gave birth, that person also legally owned
her children.</p>
<p id="psWlro">And so owning an enslaved woman means
that you’re not only reaping the benefits of this
woman’s productive labor but also her reproductive
labor. </p>
<h4 id="mmEDT5">Anna North</h4>
<p id="3DL3lF">Was that true of white men, too? Did they
have more female than male slaves?</p>
<h4 id="1KHLwo">Stephanie Jones-Rogers</h4>
<p id="Onv6KZ">Much of what I’m describing was also true
for white boys and white men. [But] during this period
of time, there was the development of the domestic
slave trade, which essentially was the purchase of
enslaved people in the upper South, in places like
Virginia and Maryland, and then their transport into
the lower South and into the Southwest when the
country expanded during the 1800s.</p>
<p id="V6K9Fp">In these sales, if an enslaved woman had
a child, that child was seen as a liability to the
slave trader. There are accounts that I talk about in
the book where these slave traders are willing to just
toss away the baby. But, there was this [white] woman
in one particular case who would go to state auctions,
and if there were babies there that were not sold
along with the mother, she would ask for those babies
to be given to her. She would keep the babies for
free.</p>
<p id="7iZoGq">In those respects, there were instances
in which white men saw enslaved children as
liabilities, and white women saw them as long-term
investments.</p>
<figure> <span> <span
data-original="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19015965/3c25134u.jpg">
<source type="image/webp"> </span></span><span><cite></cite>
</span> </figure>
<h4 id="KuWGud">Anna North</h4>
<p id="TyJLnd">You talk in the book about how white
women were able to achieve economic and social
empowerment through ownership of enslaved people,
essentially gaining some status in a patriarchal
society through dominance over black people. I’m
curious if we see echoes of this today when we look at
white women gaining economic empowerment under
capitalism?</p>
<h4 id="uUib9G">Stephanie Jones-Rogers</h4>
<p id="ZwMyyq">There is a certain kind of power that
comes with wealth. Enslaved people were wealth, their
bodies held value on a real market, within a
capitalist market. White women understood it. </p>
<p id="bZFY34">But in order to sustain this system,
white men realize that white women must be a part of
that system. They must support it, they must see the
value in it for themselves, not simply for their
husbands or their children. They need to understand
that this system benefits them personally and
directly. The only way they can do that is to allow
for them to invest in the system and to participate in
the system.</p>
<p id="Kv6z2h">And they are, in fact, invested in this
system; they participate in the system. They benefit
from this system, in every single way that white men
do. And that is key to the longevity of, the
perpetuation of the system. I think that is the same
for capitalism — when you tell a woman, “You might not
make as much as a man for doing the same work, but if
you can get your hands on these funds, nobody can deny
you.” </p>
<p id="Ome8eq">Slavery was a regime based on human
bondage, [but] it was also an economic regime, one
that was funding the national economy. When those
white women are invested, it’s not very different from
them being invested in capitalism today. It’s just a
different commodity. It’s just a different source of
wealth. </p>
<h4 id="pj3RO6">Anna North</h4>
<p id="BR1QwA">In thinking about the <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html">1619
commemoration</a>, I was thinking about the part of
your book where you look at the way white women wrote
about slavery after emancipation. In your epilogue,
you write that they portrayed themselves as “forever
sacrificing women who had played purely benevolent
roles within a nurturing system.” And you quote a
white woman who wrote that maybe the descendants of
enslaved people should even consider creating an
“anniversary to celebrate ‘the landing of their
fathers on the shores of America,’ when they were
bought and domiciled in American homes.”</p>
<p id="53xqXI">Can you talk a little bit about how white
women remembered their role in slavery after the fact
and how we actually ought to remember it today?</p>
<h4 id="vyVd7j">Stephanie Jones-Rogers</h4>
<p id="YjJkxG">When I think about that part of the book,
I also think about what is happening today. The
erasure of certain elements of horror and the darkness
of [white women’s] investment and involvement in the
history of slavery are very much why we’re shocked to
see the way that some white women respond to
interactions with black people today.</p>
<p id="RmX0ZG">You can also see that in the “send her
back” chants — the idea that black people have never
been citizens and they never belonged. I think there
are parallels to what this woman said in the early
1900s and what white women are saying today about
African-descended people, whether they be
congresswomen or just average black folk on the
street.</p>
<p id="Gr3VLP">It’s very much like, you should be
grateful because you’re here now and stop complaining,
because look what we’ve done for you. I think there
are many parallels between that kind of language now,
and the argument that she made back in the early
1900s.</p>
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