Host: Joan Neuberger, Department of History, UT-Austin
Guest: Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, University of California, Berkeley
Historians have long assumed that white women in the U.S. south benefited only indirectly from the ownership of enslaved people. Historians have neglected these women because their behavior didn’t conform to the picture we have of the patriarchal culture of the 18-19 century marriage. In an extraordinary new book, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers shows that “slave owning women not only witnessed the most brutal features of slavery, they took part in them, they profited from them, and they defended them.”
Prof. Jones-Rogers joins us today to talk about the narratives of formerly enslaved people, whose testimony changes the way we view those white women and the lives of the enslaved in the U.S.