Stephanie Jones-Rogers

NR13JonesRogersStephanie1208.jpg

The Organization of American Historians honored Stephanie Jones-Rogers for her dissertation Nobody Couldn’t Sell ’Em but Her: Slaveowning Women, Mastery, and the Gendered Politics of the Antebellum Slave Market.

Photography: 
Nick Romanenko

During the dark and violent era of slavery in the United States, southern white women were economically invested in the slave industry—as owners, buyers, and sellers. To many women, slaves were a commodity and a source of income. This startling assertion by alumna Stephanie Jones-Rogers, challenging the commonly held view that the slave market was the domain of white men, led to her receiving the 2013 Lerner-Scott prize for best doctoral dissertation in U.S. women’s history for her dissertation Nobody Couldn’t Sell ’Em but Her: Slaveowning Women, Mastery, and the Gendered Politics of the Antebellum Slave Market.

The prize, awarded annually by the Organization of American Historians, recognized Jones-Rogers LC’03, GSN’07, GSNB’12 for using the testimony of slaves to reach her conclusions. Relying on interviews with former slaves conducted during the Depression, Jones-Rogers was able to glean details about how enslaved people viewed the women who owned them. This aspect, she says, was largely omitted from white women’s letters and diaries, which were often sanitized with posterity in mind.

Southern women received slaves as birthday and wedding gifts, often in early childhood, Jones-Rogers’s research revealed. They continued to exercise ownership over their slaves after marriage, despite laws that transferred all property rights to their husbands. There was the case of a woman who publicly defied her husband during a confrontation at a slave auction, when he tried to sell her slaves, claiming they were his. She demanded that he prove it and stormed off to her home with her slaves in tow. The dissertation grew out of a notorious case of brutality involving a married slave-owner named Marie Lalaurie, whose husband had little role in her actions.

Jones-Rogers says that her findings recast the widely held notion of the “pious and genteel” southern belle and helps explain why many women participated in lynchings and resisted integration efforts after the turn of the century. A psychology major as an undergraduate, Jones-Rogers is expanding her dissertation into a book.