They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Enslaved mothers’ grief and white southerners’ attempts to render it invisible stand in stark contrast to the simultaneous “culture of mourning” that allowed whites to openly express their sorrow after the loss of loved ones. During the nineteenth century, white women were encouraged to mourn for the dead, and their “private expressions of grief helped usher in new conventions that enabled women to more fully express their acute sense of loss.” However, while “nineteenth-century [white] Americans were encouraged to openly mourn for the dead, especially for infants and young children,” white southerners brutally denied enslaved mothers and fathers the right to do the same. In the face of these denials, the enslaved mothers whom slave owners compelled to serve as wet nurses, particularly those who had recently lost a child or who were forced to separate from him or her, could not, or would not, hide their sorrow and grief, and such emotional displays were disturbingly obvious to owners and potential buyers. While from today’s perspective we might have assumed that the culture of mourning would inevitably