I read this book over the last couple of days.

One hates to use the word “enjoy” for a book like this because of the topic, but somehow “appreciate” doesn’t quite get there either.
It’s an excellent deep dive into the role of female slaveholders in the South. I learned a lot. Summary:
Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave‑owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. 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. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave‑owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.
General backstory:
First and second-wave feminism, both popular and academic, has generally positioned women as victims and as morally superior to patriarchy, etc. More recent academic trends push back against that, mostly because of the work of people of color who look back at history and see, for example, deep racism and anti-immigrant motivations in the 19th century American women’s movement.
This is the context here: the image of southern white women as somehow fundamentally disengaged from and not responsible for the slave economy or gentle souls who smoothed out the rough edges of their men’s treatment of enslaved people.
Jones-Rogers is here to challenge that, and she does so very ably, and in the process points out the complexities of history and the past.
So, for example, we can look at the antebellum South and see “progress” in the economic position of women as we see women fighting to maintain their economic independence, even in the context of marriage, as they do their utmost, including going to court, to maintain the control of the property they’ve brought into a marriage or inherited from their own families.
Go! Ladies! Claim those rights!
But…that property was quite often, and predominantly human chattel.
Oh.
I point this out as a reminder that the ties that bind us socially, economically and politically are anything but simple and are always, always, morally nuanced and more often than not impure and compromised.
Past and present.
None of us are saints. None of our movements are pure. None of our “progress” comes without someone else, somewhere, paying a price.
I appreciated Jones-Rogers’ work here – and am interested that her next project focuses on women’s involvement in the slave trade – because I am up for anything that shakes the mythos that women are inherently kinder and more fair than men, and that “if women ran the world…..”
Yeah.
Watch Yellowjackets and contemplate its popularity to see how much people actually buy that claptrap.