This book should be required reading. Not only does it have vast amounts of information and documentation, but it is really well written. 
(I would also suggest looking at the content warnings)

They Were Her Property turns an academic eye on white women as slave owners in the United States and as full participants and beneficiaries of slavery as a system. They were not bystanders. Their delicate female sensibilities were not protected from the slave trade. They were calculating, economic minds that knew how to navigate the system for their own gain. This narrative is a reminder of the importance of intersectional feminism. Correcting the dominant historical narrative to acknowledge women's agency isn't an uncomplicated victory for women because it demands white women abandon using gender to absolve ourselves of guilt. The author chronicles how white women were busy framing their own experiences in the postwar era to distance themselves from slavery or to cast a maternal, nurturing light on their past behaviors. Historical documents and recorded interviews do not uphold that story.

I love returning to academic nonfiction for the miles of footnotes and precise connections between evidence and argument. This book is especially compelling for the variety of source material and for consulting overlooked and dismissed accounts. Newspapers, court documents, and contracts are bolstered with white women's diaries and personal or business correspondence. The author also directly quotes from WPA interviews with formerly enslaved people, who give valuable insights into the actions and thoughts of their mistresses in the home, where no written records reach. Their voices are one of the most powerful aspects of the book beyond the strengths of the central thesis.

What most struck me about this book, of the many carefully laid arguments, was the concept that slavery was inescapable in the United States, especially but not limited to life in the South. It permeated public and private spheres, it was the economic foundation of society, and there was no way to shield white women from its practices, even to support a feminine ideal. And the author makes it clear that this futile goal wasn't even actively sought. White women were taught how to be slave mistresses from childhood, they received slaves in their own right to mark important life events, and they were more than capable of managing their own wealth whether through business (buying/selling/hiring) decisions or philosophy towards the care and discipline of slaves they owned.

I highly recommend this as an opportunity to reevaluate your understanding of a crucial, dark aspect of American history with clear implications for current events. It's especially important for white women to become familiar with this information not only as a way of taking responsibility for our own history but to prevent ourselves from becoming comfortable in a harmful, fallacious white feminism viewpoint.

Jones-Rogers pulls on various sources, including interviews with formally enslaved people that were conducted as part of the Works Progress Administration, court documents, and contemporary print sources, to illuminate the role that white women played in slavery. Her investigation reveals the full extent to which slave-owning women were active participants in the slave economy. These women were also no less brutal than white men in the way they interacted with the enslaved people they owned or came into contact with.

I listened to this on audiobook since it was available to borrow on Libby and I wasn't sure when I'd get a chance to read a physical copy. I learned a lot, but I feel this is one that I have to get a physical copy of so I can re-read it and make highlights and notes. There is a lot that's covered in this book.

While listening to this history, I was making connections to the present day - to how we can trace a thread from slave-owning white women and their ideas of, sense of entitlement to, and actions toward enslaved persons and Africans in general to present-day white women and the way they relate to and speak about Black people. 

Content warnings and notes: When quoting interviewees and other sources, the n-word and other slurs are written out in the text/read out in the audiobook

This was a challenging book to get through. I’m a white women who has read lots of books regarding racial disparity before. The testimonies and information are presented very matter-of-fact which really emphasized the calloused business nature slavery was given. There were many times I turned off the audiobook because even listening to it felt disrespectful. I think it’s important to know the reality of the past do we understand how we arrived at our present. That said, I don’t know when it would ever feel appropriate to hear the things white Americans have forced on Black people as a whole.