Book review: They were her property: white women as slave owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

In They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers challenges the idea that white women were passive bystanders to the slave economy in the US, instead demonstrating their active participation in its structures of brutality and exploitation. Compellingly written and centring the testimonies of formerly enslaved people, this award-winning book is an important contribution to both historiography and contemporary politics as it adds to an ongoing conversation about the scope of women’s agency – and white women’s culpability – in the nineteenth century, writes Ben Margulies.