A bold and searing analysis into the part of white women in the American slave overall economy.

Bridging women’s history, the history of the Southern, and BLACK history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white ladies in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers attracts on a number of sources to show that slave-owning females were sophisticated economic actors who straight involved in and benefited from the South’s slave marketplace. Because women typically inherited more slaves than property, enslaved people were often their primary way to obtain wealth. Not only did white women frequently refuse to cede possession of their slaves with their husbands, they utilized management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those utilized by slave-owning guys. White women positively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and utilized it for financial and public empowerment. By analyzing the financially entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning ladies, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that causes us to rethink the economics and interpersonal conventions of slaveholding America.