What Jones-Rogers wants to do is “uncover hitherto hidden relationships among gender, slavery, and capitalism” by examining “women’s economic investments in slavery, rather than simply their ideological and sentimental connections to the system.” Doing so, to take her own repeated word, emphatically changes slavery’s historiographic “narrative.”
They Were Her Property brings white women’s economic strategy to the fore. But minimizing sentimentalism does not mean dismissing the emotional intensities of slavery’s consumer. This history rebinds feeling and finance, reorganizing their relation. Jones-Rogers’s careful tracking of the slaveholding rituals of ownership exchange shows how the markers of a white woman’s life that mean one thing in a sentimental plot — her birth, her entry into courtship, her marriage, her mothering — in fact became the occasions when enslaved people, most often women, passed into white women’s possession. The culture of slaveholding made slavery’s economics so intimate they felt biological — beyond question.
Not only were women and the enslaved not united in their oppression, Jones-Rogers shows; white women seized power over the enslaved in order to operate independently, outside of coverture. Through their savvy consumer relation to Black people, white women became the kind of political agents their world could recognize: property owners in their own right. Jones-Rogers makes the stakes crystal clear. For white women, she explains, “slavery was their freedom.”
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Women of color have long described the cruelty inherent in white women’s consumerism. They Were Her Property adds a vital archive to this history. The robustness of this tradition makes the necessity of Jones-Rogers’s book that much more compelling — and, for white women such as myself, it should make it that much more jarring.
Consider the question of coverture. Documenting coverture’s effects has been a central feminist activity since at least Elizabeth Cady Stanton. So how could white feminists have examined coverture so intently and seen only its victimization of “women”? How could they have not seen how coverture divided women along racial lines, as white women used their power over enslaved women to escape its bounds?
They Were Her Property is an incredible work of scholarship, engaging in vital feminist practices. But it’s too simple to consider it “feminist” scholarship without asking what that label might mean. What Jones-Rogers’s archive clearly demonstrates is how profoundly feminist attention to the victimhood of “women” has been inflected by sentimental storytelling — and how, in this story, the more attention you pay to white women’s victimhood, the harder the experience of Black woman is to see.