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Podcast: New Books in the American South
Episode: Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, "They Were Her Property:Â White Women as Slave Owners in the American South" (Yale UP, 2019)
Description: 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. In her new book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale University Press, 2019) 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 wh...