Some important excerpts give a picture of the, ahem, “motivated reasoning” in the hallowed halls of “history”:
Beliefs about female involvement in slavery have been shaped by a particular narrative. Women are seen as secondary figures, kept distant from the buying and selling of humans by patriarchal norms and their own feminine delicacy. In some historical writings, this narrative has been reinforced by an exclusive focus on women’s subordination, removing their agency from the historical record. The issue, of course, is that evidence paints a very different picture. When historians examine transaction records, probate wills, slave legislation and “runaway” advertisements, they find that women were not mere onlookers, but buyers, sellers and enforcers of the slave trade.
When one actually quantifies the extent of women’s participation in slavery, the narrative of female passivity unravels rather quickly. A study analyzing over 15,000 sale records from the New Orleans slave market between 1856 and 1861 (the largest such market in the antebellum US) revealed that women appeared as either buyers or sellers in 30.2% of all transactions. Even more telling is that women were not disproportionately concentrated on one side of the market. They were listed as sellers in 16.5% of transactions and as buyers in 17.2%, a near-perfect balance that directly challenges the notion that these were widows merely liquidating inherited property.
If women’s involvement in the slave market were simply a consequence of inheriting property after a husband’s death, one would expect to observe significantly more female sellers than buyers. The nearly equal distribution is therefore “inconsistent with White women being passive owners from, say, the death of a spouse.” Rather, it suggests they were actively acquiring enslaved people as property.
… “Runaway” advertisements, another source of data on slave ownership, listed women as owners in 11.5% of all notices.
… Analysing over 1,200 wills, researchers discovered that approximately three-quarters of all women who made them during the first century of British settlement in Jamaica owned slaves.
The slave code of 1740… required women who owned more than ten slaves to take part in slave patrols on equal footing with men…
The comforting image of the “passive mistress” — graciously presiding over a household, perhaps somewhat oblivious to the harsher aspects of slavery — is not merely incomplete, but actually wrong. Women bought and sold slaves, served on slave patrols, and meted out punishments. It is fashionable nowadays to blame everything on white men. Yet just as blacks took an active role in the slave trade, so did women.
Pooh-pooh, written by a male, predictably. Oh wait, he’s Black. Drats.
The method: (a) invoke coverture while ignoring that slave states deliberately exempted enslaved property, (b) ignore, well, transaction records and wills, (c) read only the newspaper ads that confirm your priors, (d) above all, don’t lose tenure!