As we transition from Black History Month to Women's History Month, I've chosen a topic that encompasses both, a topic that addresses a major misconception in American history. What role did white women actually play in enslaving people? For a very long time, historians assumed that women were merely passive enslavers. They enslaved because their husbands enslaved. They were involved only because of their roles as housekeepers. But, when we look at the actual evidence - documents, letters, interviews, etc. - we are forced to consider another reality. In many cases, white women played an active, possibly even dominant, role in buying, selling, punishing, and hiring out enslaved people. Let's fix that.

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Sources:

• From Naming to Knowing "Women as Enslavers"
• New York Times "Scholars Thought White Women Were Passive Enslavers. They Were Wrong"
• Michigan Law Review "A Different Type of Property: White Women and the Human Property They Kept"
• From Naming to Knowing "Junius Brickle"
• Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
• They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie Jones-Rogers

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