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

Jones-Rogers ultimately presents an exploration of female power. She chronicles the ways in which white slave-owning women were able to navigate 19th century southern society and find new identities of power and authority. Her book seeks to prove the level of power and authority these women possessed and the active roles they played in demonstrating that power. Slave-owning women were only able to reach these exalted heights through their conscious and unremitting devotion to the brutalization of enslaved women.

Jones-Rogers provides countless examples of the ways in which southern slave-owning women disregarded the humanity of enslaved people in their attempts to maintain their positions of authority. She classifies these examples as violence. The appropriation of enslaved women’s breast milk speaks to the brutality of these women. This dehumanization of enslaved mothers, through the treatment of their bodies as machines and their milk as goods, is referred to as “maternal violence” that results in the exploitation of enslaved women for white female empowerment. Jones-Rogers also provides examples of the physical violence both tolerated and perpetuated by slave-owning women as they attempt to navigate the brutal institution of slavery in the same management styles of slave-owning men. By implementing the slave management styles of men, these slave-owning women adopted a system rooted in the beating and killing of enslaved people for the purposes of order and control.