Women, American Slavery, and the Law

FAIN: FA-251511-17

Stephanie Elizabeth Jones-Rogers
University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94704-5940)

A book-length study of the role that slave-owning women played in shaping changes to American property law in antebellum North and the South.

Women, American Slavery, and the Law is a book-length manuscript which examines the relationship between gender and the evolution of American slave/property law in the North and the South from the colonial period to American slavery’s legal end. It is deeply concerned with the ways that slavery and slave-ownership shaped the operation of marital property law, and the ways that married women understood the relationship between them. More profoundly, the book elucidates the roles that slave-owning women played in shaping the contours of slave/property laws as the nation, and the institution of slavery, expanded into the West and Deep South. By doing all of this, it will offer a much-needed corrective, which intervenes in three subfields—the history of American law, women’s history, and the history of slavery.

Associated Products

They were her property : white women as slave (Book)
Title: They were her property : white women as slave
Author: Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Abstract: 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.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://search.worldcat.org/title/1085547912
Primary URL Description: WorldCat
Secondary URL: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300251838/they-were-her-property/
Secondary URL Description: Yale University Press
Publisher: Yale University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780300218664
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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