The slaveholding household was a place of coerced production and reproduction, racial and sexual exploitation, and physical and psychological violence.7 It was a place where white southern women grew accustomed to the violence of slavery, contemplated the sale and purchase of slaves, and used the bodies of the enslaved people they owned in ways that reinforced their pecuniary value. The household became an extension of the slave market, and white women capitalized upon their access to both. They not only “did the thinking about slave buying,” taking stock of their labor needs and the kinds of
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