Carnegie Mellon University

Mistresses of the Market: White Women and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Slave Trade

Canceled: Mistresses of the Market: White Women and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Slave Trade

The 14th Annual Margaret Morrison Distinguished Lecture in Women’s History

In light of public health concerns about the COVID-19 virus, The Department of History is acting out of an abundance of caution and postponing our Margaret Morrison Lecture which was scheduled for Thursday, March 26th. We look forward to rescheduling this event soon.

Speaker
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Associate Professor, Department of History, Affiliated Faculty, African American Studies, American Studies, the Center for the Study of Law & Society, and the Center for Race & Gender, University of California, Berkeley

Jones-Rogers examines white women’s relationships to and investments in American slavery. She reveals them to be central rather than peripheral actors in the institution’s creation. Using myriad sources, including the testimony of enslaved people, Jones-Rogers investigates the ways white women both actively participated in the South’s slave market economy and energetically carved out power for themselves, through the subjugation of enslaved bodies. At the same time, she shows how this dynamic proved fundamental to the nation’s economic growth.

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (2019). The manuscript is based on her revised dissertation, winner of the Organization of American Historians’ Lerner-Scott Dissertation Prize.