Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers: They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

Excerpt

Dr. Jones-Rogers’s book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South argues that white women were not merely complicit in the institutions of slavery and white supremacy, but that they were in fact “co-conspirators.” Using evidence from court documents, newspapers, and, most importantly, the interviews with formerly enslaved people conducted by the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), which was a New Deal program and part of the Works Progress Administration that provided work for writers during the Great Depression, Jones-Rogers is able to counter the “Lost Cause” narrative promoted by many of these former mistresses, which ignored the brutality of slavery and focused on promoting an image of plantation mistresses as benevolent caretakers. Jones-Rogers’s account of white women slave owners offers a critically needed intervention into discussions of the role of white women in American white supremacy. Books such as Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage (2008), while also using the interviews from the FWP, focus more narrowly on the lived experiences of people who had been enslaved and on their interactions with their white mistresses within plantation households. Cecily Jones’s Engendering Whiteness (2007), on the other hand, relies primarily on a more traditional historical archive. Jones-Rogers’s scholarship is unique because of its close attention to the testimony of those who had been enslaved as well as other forms of archives that offers both a personal and economic history of white women’s role in the institution of slavery. …