“For them, slavery was their freedom.”

I believe this one short quote from the book most perfectly encapsulates what this book is about and what I learned from reading it.

I often struggle to read nonfiction and have to listen in bits. However, I consumed They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South just as quickly as I would any book in my favorite genres.

As a white woman, it uncovered so many false narratives about history & white women’s role in it that I did not even realize I held.

Many historians and the cultural narratives of white people as a whole, intentionally perpetuate the idea that white women are innocent and submissive and held very little agency or authority during slavery and afterwards. This book will without question shatter this notion because, while in some cases it was certainly true, oftentimes it’s entirely inaccurate.

This book so clearly outlines that the culture in the American South during slavery that is so often depicted as unerringly patriarchal, was actually very heterarchical when it came to slave owning white women. White women actually owned a lot of their own property (largely enslaved people), owned thriving businesses, operated their own slave auctions, and managed their own plantations including selling and disciplining (ie torturing and abusing) the enslaved people they owned.

These women did have economic autonomy—even that which was contractually outlined and respected by courts separate from their husbands and families.

The abolishment of slavery stripped them of that. It, “placed them in positions of economic dependency, and forced them to establish restrictive relationships with those who still had financial resources in order to survive. Slave owning women also feared emancipation because it held the potential to destabilize and reallocate the power they exercised within their marriages and families. Authority which was often vested in their ownership of property.”

I knew of course that white women obviously participated in and supported the institution of slavery. However, I did not understand just how actively they participated in constructing, maintaining, and growing it. I did not understand just how much power they actually held.

“Former slave owning women’s deeper and more complex investments in slavery help explain why, in the years following the Civil War, they helped construct the South’s system of racial segregation...

If we acknowledge that white women stood to personally and directly benefit from the commodification and enslavement of African Americans, we can better understand their participation in post-war white supremacist movements and atrocities such as lynching. As well as their membership in organizations like the Klu Klux Klan.”

I see so clearly how the white women discussed in this book from their own accounts, court accounts, formerly enslaved people’s accounts, and other public accounts, were the ancestors of white women today. Not just literally, but culturally. I see the same ideals, values, and behaviors alive and well and largely unchanged in white women today.

The connection is just made so much clearer after reading this and I cannot recommend everyone read this enough—most especially fellow white women.

Finally, the very end of the book has another perfect summary of the book:

“Southern white women’s role in upholding and sustaining slavery form part of the much larger history of white supremacy and oppression and, through it all, they were not passive bystanders. They were co-conspirators.”

They Were Her Property - Likewise Book Reviews

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