White Women Were Active in the American Slave Trade, Statistical Research Shows

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/22/us/white-women-american-slave-trade.html

created by DoremusJessup on 24/11/2024 at 15:50 UTC

2875 upvotes, 17 top-level comments (showing 17)

Comments

Comment by [deleted] at 24/11/2024 at 17:42 UTC

108 upvotes, 1 direct replies

[removed]

Comment by Alexios_Makaris at 24/11/2024 at 19:39 UTC

203 upvotes, 4 direct replies

This seems unsurprising? Like basically every group in America other than actual slaves, had some involvement in the slave trade. Certainly some groups had extremely low participation rates in it, but I doubt any group was at 0 member over the ~250 years of legal slavery in North America avoided ever having a member active in the trade of slaves.

Comment by Tessninky01 at 24/11/2024 at 16:26 UTC

263 upvotes, 4 direct replies

I highly recommend the book They Were Her Property by Stephanie Jones-Rogers. It is a detailed and meticulous account of how white women participated in and benefitted from slavery.

Comment by SprawlValkyrie at 24/11/2024 at 20:10 UTC

91 upvotes, 3 direct replies

Conversely, white women were deeply involved in the Abolitionist movement, to the extent that it may not have succeeded without them. One example:

“New England women were particularly effective at organizing and sending anti-slavery petitions to Congress. The Liberator reported that petitions issued by women in New England doubled that of their male counterparts. “In petitioning, women were far more active than men, as evidenced by the vast number of female signatures on antislavery petitions in comparison to their numbers in the antislavery crusade.”

Source: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/a-great-inheritance-abolitionist-practices-in-the-women-s-rights-movement.htm#:~:text=Along%20with%20anti%2Dslavery%20fairs,organized%20on%20a%20national%20scale[1].

1: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/a-great-inheritance-abolitionist-practices-in-the-women-s-rights-movement.htm#:~:text=Along%20with%20anti%2Dslavery%20fairs,organized%20on%20a%20national%20scale

Comment by deathbychips2 at 25/11/2024 at 01:36 UTC*

12 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Yes..

Was this a question before. Women have been present in every part of society all throughout history, even the horrible evil parts and we should stop pretending all women stayed home and knitted until the 1970s.

Comment by JasonWaterfaII at 24/11/2024 at 19:12 UTC

44 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Read Frederick Douglass’s autobiography or Harriet Tubman’s biography or I’m sure many others and you can hear about the active roll of white women in slavery from a primary source.

Comment by hannibal_morgan at 24/11/2024 at 19:39 UTC

53 upvotes, 2 direct replies

Why would this at all be surprising?

Comment by leftguard44 at 25/11/2024 at 00:06 UTC

15 upvotes, 0 direct replies

I’d say there’s a lot of precedence in history that women don’t get as much credit as they deserve, in terms of both achievements and evils

Comment by HauntedButtCheeks at 24/11/2024 at 20:21 UTC

23 upvotes, 0 direct replies

As a white woman, I think this was always obvious. Imo the only reason anyone didn't know this is because white male scholars were invested in perpetuating the historical fantasy of woman playing passive roles in society.

Comment by BigDoinks710 at 24/11/2024 at 22:15 UTC

16 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Yall ever heard of Patty Cannon? Now that was one messed up bitch. She ran a gang that would go and capture free african-americans in the north and then sell them to slavers in the south.

On her Wikipedia page, the first picture you see is a painting of her tossing a black baby into a fire pit...

Comment by saltytarts at 24/11/2024 at 21:45 UTC

5 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Slavery ended in 1865, women got the vote in 1920. Is this touched upon in the book?