Scholars Thought White Women Were Passive Enslavers. They Were Wrong.

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For generations, scholars argued that white women were rarely involved in the active buying and selling of Black people. But a growing body of research is challenging that narrative, documenting the significant role that white women played in the American slave trade.

Between 1856 and 1861, white women engaged in nearly a third of the sales and purchases of enslaved people in New Orleans, which was home to the nation’s largest slave market at the time, according to a working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research earlier this year.

In 1830, white women accounted for about 16 percent of the purchases and sales of enslaved people in New Orleans, the study found. Elsewhere, an analysis of runaway slave advertisements published between 1853 and 1860, which were compiled by the Black abolitionist William Still, found that white women were listed as owners in about 12 percent of the listings.

The findings demonstrate that active participation in slavery crossed gender lines, according to Trevon D. Logan, a professor of economics at Ohio State University, who was a co-author of the report with Benton Wishart, a student at the university who graduated in May.

“​​We’re talking about literally thousands of women being involved in this industry,” said Dr. Logan, who also serves as the director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s working group on race and stratification in the economy.

His report builds on extensive research conducted by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley, who wrote about Ms. Poore and other white women enslavers, in her book, “They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South,” which was published by Yale University Press in 2019.

Dr. Jones-Rogers’s research found that female enslavers were ubiquitous and showed that their ability to buy and sell Black people brought them significant economic freedom in a patriarchal society that sharply curtailed female economic independence.

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Historians had long suggested that white women were passive enslavers, who inherited Black people, for instance, instead of actively buying and selling them, Dr. Jones-Rogers said. They pointed to common-law legal structures, which prevented married women from assuming property rights. Some also suggested that white women were natural allies of the enslaved since both groups suffered under white male domination.

Dr. Jones-Rogers noticed a disconnect, though, between that scholarship and interviews conducted with formerly enslaved people who described female enslavers who actively bought and sold people. Intrigued, she mined those interviews along with the letters and writings of white men who described their business dealings with white women. She found that some of these women studied the fluctuations of the slave market, attended auctions and bargained to get the best prices.

She also found that laws enacted in a number of Southern states explicitly granted married white women the right to own, enslave and whip Black people, independent of their husbands.

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Dr. Jones-Rogers believes the research also helps to explain why many white Southern women romanticized slavery and supported the system of racial segregation that emerged after the Civil War, a system that helped ensure that their families could continue to benefit from a plentiful supply of low-cost Black labor.

They “choose white supremacy,” she said, “because they see it as economically advantageous.”