They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

In Chapter 5, Jones-Rogers explores the role of enslaved women as wet nurses. She provides a personal example of an enslaved woman’s purchase. Facilitated by a white woman, this transaction occurs in the street, rather than a traditional slave market. Jones-Rogers introduces the central claim of this chapter, which will explore the ways in which white women “transformed the ability to suckle into a skilled form of labor, and created a largely invisible niche sector of the slave market that catered exclusively to white women” (102). Jones-Rogers provides an overview of the scholarship surrounding the commodification of nursing in this time period and discusses how historians have come to the consensus that white southern women in the upper and middle classes used enslaved wet nurses sparingly. Jones-Rogers criticizes the small sampling of documents used by historians to reach this conclusion. This small sample of documents focused only on elite, literate women rather than the white female majority in the South. Through the examination of a wider range of firsthand accounts, Jones-Rogers argues that relying on enslaved wet nurses was more widespread than historians previously claimed (103).

The practice of wet nursing was common. However, in the 19th century, fears emerged regarding “the power of bodily fluids and a child’s ability to imbibe moral and racial essences through a woman’s breast milk” (103).