“Nobody couldn't sell'em but her": slaveowning women, mastery, and the gendered politics of the antebellum slave market

Historians richly document white women’s social, ideological, and cultural roles within nineteenth-century slaveholding households and communities, yet they rarely consider their economic relationships to slavery. Scholars also recognize enslaved people’s understandings of how profoundly male slaveowners’ economic decisions affected their lives, but they neglect enslaved people’s knowledge about how female slaveownership—not just domestic management—shaped their experiences in bondage as well. Drawing upon slaveowners’ correspondence, slave trader’s papers, ex-slave narratives, travel writing, illustrations, newspapers, city and business directories, financial records, as well as legal and military documents, my dissertation examines the ways that gender shaped white married women’s experiences of slaveownership in the nineteenth century, it demonstrates how slaveownership afforded them particular kinds of power that pivoted upon the right to enslave and own human beings, and it sees white slaveowning women and their economic activities through the eyes of the enslaved African-Americans who served them.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Stephanie Elizabeth Jones-Roger