The National Susan B. Anthony Museum & House in Rochester, NY, will host an online lecture by Dr. Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, a scholar whose research brings a powerful and nuanced perspective to the complexities of history and the intersections of race, gender, and power in shaping America’s past and present.
Dr. Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers earned her doctoral degree in African-American History from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in 2012. She is currently an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in African-American history, the history of American slavery, and women’s and gender history. She also holds the position of Chancellor’s Professor of History for the term 2021–2024.
She authored They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale University Press, 2019), a highly acclaimed book that won numerous awards after publication, including the 2020 Harriet Tubman Prize, the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, the Charles S. Sydnor Award, the Best Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Merle Curti Prize for American social history.
They Were Her Property draws on a variety of sources to show that slave‑owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth.
Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave‑owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment.
By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave‑owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.
Jones-Rogers is the first African-American and third woman to win the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History since the award’s inception in 1980. In 2023, she received the Dan David Prize, the largest history prize in the world.
She is working on her second book, Women of the Trade, which reorients our understanding of the British Atlantic slave trade by centering the lives and experiences of English, African, and Afro-English women in its telling.
This online event will take place January 8, 2025 at 1 pm ET.
Click Here To Register for this online event.
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