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This is what a lot of people say and think about slave-owning women. That they stumbled into slave-ownership, that they were “born into it,” as some slave-owning women claimed, and more egregiously, that they had little to no personal economic interest in slave-ownership.
Of course, these things were true for SOME women. But not the women in my book. Sure, they inherited them. And many were born into slaveholding families.
But make no mistake. These women invested economically in slavery because it was in THEIR, not just their husbands’, best interests to do so.
The (mostly) married slave-owning women in #TheyWereHerProperty bought enslaved men, women, and children, sold enslaved men, women, and children, hired them to non-slave-owning whites and pocketed their wages.
Some of the women in #TheyWereHerProperty compelled enslaved women to breastfeed their white infants, separating them from their own children, and some even sold the bodies and sexual labor of enslaved women in brothels they operated.
Some white women participated in the business of slavery—the slave trade—and bought enslaved people at low prices and sold them for more. In other words, they “flipped” them like people “flip” houses now.
So, let me be crystal clear. The white women in my book (and others), who were deeply, economically invested in slavery, didn’t need white men or anyone else to convince them that perpetuating slavery and embracing white supremacy was in their best interest.
They chose to buy and sell enslaved people BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO. It wasn’t an accident or something white men convinced them they needed to do or made them do. From girlhood, they understood, that white supremacy and slavery benefitted them as white persons AND as women.
As I say in the book, these white girls and women understood that “slavery was their freedom.” Our nation’s laws codified women’s oppression, BUT slave-ownership offered these girls and women a measure of freedom not otherwise “enjoyed” by girls and women who didn’t own people.
I’ll give an example. One woman would buy sickly slaves, nurse them back to health, and sell them for a profit.
