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Lizzie Anna Burwell was like many other white girls growing up in slaveholding households in the Lynesville, North Carolina, area in 1847. She loved flowers and often strolled through her parents’ garden with Fanny, the enslaved woman charged with her care.
In her new book, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, UC Berkeley associate professor of history, expands our understanding of American slavery and the 19th century slave market with an investigation into the role of white women in the slave economy.
In her book, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, Jones-Rogers makes the case that white women were far from passive bystanders in the business of slavery,...
They Were Her Property is "the first extensive study of the role of Southern white women in the plantation economy and slave-market system" [1] and disputes conventional wisdom that white women played a passive or minimal role in slaveholding.
As Union troops made their way through the south freeing enslaved people, white women would move enslaved people farther from the soldiers’ path.
Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave-owning men.
Slavery gave white women in the South significantly more economic independence than those in the North, and they used this freedom with remarkable regularity.