, Vox reached out to Jones-Rogers to talk about the history of white, slaveholding women in the South and what that history says about race, gender, wealth, and power in America in 2019. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.When I was in graduate school, I was taking all these different courses and reading all these books on African American history but also on women’s and gender history.
I looked to traditional sources where we might think to find those answers: a white woman’s diary, a white woman’s letters and correspondence between family members, et cetera. They mentioned very sporadically issues related to answering this question, but there was not this kind of sustained conversation. So, I said, African Americans are talking about this. Formerly enslaved people are talking about this.
Formerly enslaved people’s testimonies about these women are, in many respects, the only surviving record to document exactly that.So in looking at those testimonies, what did you find in terms of the roles that white women and girls had in slavery, and the way that they formed their identities through their involvement in slavery?What I thought was really interesting as I read much of the scholarship on white slave-owning women is that so much of it starts when women are adults.
There are even accounts of slave-holding parents and family members giving white female infants enslaved people as their own. There is one particular instance of a case, in a court record, where a woman talks about how her grandfather gave her an enslaved person as her own when she was 9 months old.
They are prepared, they are knowledgeable, and they work with parents and others who are willing to assist them to develop protective measures to ensure that the relinquishment of all of their property wealth and assets doesn’t happen once they get married.Going along with that, can you talk about the ways in which slavery benefited white women and girls, both economically and socially?Women cannot do many of the things that men can do in this period of time.
I said, “Okay, yes, that would be practical,” but what has also been important to recognize is that these women understood the law. There are laws on the books, during this period that ensure whenever a person owns an enslaved woman, if that woman gave birth, that person also legally owned her children.
In those respects, there were instances in which white men saw enslaved children as liabilities, and white women saw them as long-term investments.
voxdotcom the historians 'chose' to write things a 'certain way' for a 'certain reason'