They Were Her Property

They Were Her Property disputes the idea that white women did not play a significant role in slaveholding in the American south. The book addresses the widely held belief that white women were gentler to enslaved people than white men, and dispels the notion of the "Jealous Mistress" who is angry that her husband has sex with enslaved women. Jones-Rogers contends that slaveholding was a key mechanism for white women to build wealth and maintain financial independence from their future husbands, and they skirted losing enslaved people to their husbands through various legal tools. ==Awards and nominations==

• Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Los Angeles Times (2019) • Merle Curti Social History Award, Organization of American Historians (2020) • Lincoln Prize finalist, Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (2020) ==Critical reception==

The book received positive critical reception. In a review for The Washington Post, Elizabeth R. Varon wrote: "In holding slave-owning women to account, Jones-Rogers has provided a brilliant, innovative analysis of American slavery, one that sets a new standard for scholarship on the subject." Parul Sehgal stated for The New York Times: "Jones-Rogers is a crisp and focused writer. She trains her gaze on the history and rarely considers slavery’s reverberations. They are felt on every page, however." Jeff Forret said in his review for Southwestern Historical Quarterly: "Jones-Rogers offers a bold reinterpretation of the relationship between slavery and slave-owning women in the nineteenth-century South. The prose in They Were Her Property is strong and clear, containing no shortage of appalling stories of the violence and cruelty endemic to southern slavery." == Publication ==