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

I’ll be honest: before I even opened this book, I had a visceral reaction. The title alone made my stomach tighten. Still, my desire to know more—really, my need to have confirmed what I already suspected—pushed me to read on. Jones-Rogers argues, with extensive archival evidence, that many white women were active, knowing, and often brutal participants in the system of chattel slavery. She names them plainly as “co-conspirators.” And the receipts are there. This was not a light read. I moved through it slowly and intentionally, often needing to pause. Some of the stories were heavy, infuriating, and deeply unsettling. At times, the book straight up pissed me off—not because it was poorly written, but because of how clearly and unapologetically it exposed the truth. I found myself stopping to do side research on the people and institutions mentioned, including learning more about the Works Progress Administration (WPA). I’ve learned that when I understand the broader historical context, my connection to a book deepens—and with this one, that grounding felt necessary. A key strength of the book is its thematic structure rather than a strict chronology. This approach helps dismantle the myth of the “gentler” white woman and reveals patterns of ownership, inheritance, economic exploitation, and emotional violence. Jones-Rogers shows how white women legally owned enslaved people—often through inheritance—and then used that power to exploit, punish, sell, and control human lives, even after slavery formally ended. While slavery was gendered, Jones-Rogers insists it was never male-exclusive. White women were not passive bystanders or reluctant beneficiaries; many were deliberate, strategic, and at times violent participants in sustaining the system. This book forces a reckoning. It complicates narratives of white womanhood and innocence and exposes how patriarchy and white supremacy worked together, not in tension but in collaboration. It challenges modern impulses to soften responsibility or narrow the scope of who was “responsible” for slavery. Slavery was not upheld by laws and men alone—it was maintained daily by women who exercised power, violence, and economic control. Sitting with that truth isn’t easy. But recognizing it matters. It deepens our understanding of American history and the roots of racial injustice, even when that truth is uncomfortable, angering, and hard to hold.

I got about 40% through the book, but I have to DNF it. I have two specific issues with it. The first is the entrenched paradigm of ownership that really underlies the entire book. It begins with the terminology. The author is careful to use the current term “enslaved people” where previous generations would have used “slaves.” Fine, good start. But then she consistently talks about people “owning” other people, in just such terms. Occasionally, this is necessary, to be clear about why a particular slaveholder takes a certain stance or makes a certain statement. But just as often, it would be enlightening to begin from the perspective that slaveholding was a wretched abomination, rather than an abstract question of property rights. Take passages like these, discussing how women occasionally had to battle with their own families over the question of the people they held in slavery:

On more than a few occasions, slave-owning women denied these privileges to spouses, kin, and community members and exercised complete control over the enslaved people they owned. Court records also documented the experiences of typical, not simply elite, slave-owning women, litigants who owned fewer than ten slaves. The majority, in fact, owned only one or two.

or

Furthermore, their children often proved to be the instigators of legal, yet underhanded, attempts to take these women’s slaves from them. These women faced extraordinary challenges when they held legal title to property. In addition to husbands, married women’s fathers, brothers, sons, and nephews often attempted to infringe upon their property rights.

It can be easy to lose sight of the fact that these people are quarreling over how to enslave autonomous human beings. The book treats these interfamilial relationships among the slaveholding class as though they were not just the paramount concern, but nearly the only concern. Those aren’t outlying cases, and in the end it isn’t just a question of language. The root problem is that the entire question is only ever really considered—at least through the introduction and first three chapters, at which point I quit reading—from the perspective of enslavers themselves. When we get anything from the perspective of someone held in slavery, it is almost exclusively to reinforce a preceding statement from the point of view of the enslaver, or else simply to support the contention that it was in fact the woman of the slaveholding household who exercised authority in some situation or another. Which brings me to my second point. This book spends an inordinate amount of time and energy vigorously defending the notion that women could be slaveholders, too. Sometimes on their own, sometimes in concert with their husbands, sometimes in contention with their husbands. My problem is that I would have granted that premise before ever starting the book, but here it’s treated as a revelatory—even controversial—conclusion. I don’t find it difficult to accept, so I am not moved by the repeated marshaling of evidence in support of it. There’s just not much of value here, and what there is is just remarkably frustrating. I’ll admit that I may have missed something in the last 60% that I skipped. But I didn’t see much changing, and I couldn’t bring myself to keep wading through it as it was.

Constant insight about how mistresses exist and show up today in all spaces.