Status Updates From They Were Her Property: Whi...

The abolition of slavery placed southern women back into a place of economic dependency.

“But like the Confederate soldiers who lay slain on the battle-fields, slave-owning women lost their war-and most of their wealth along with it.”

“Women often saw the Civil War as a personal battle, one they deemed worth fighting not just as southerners resisting the Union advance onto their land, or as "soldiers' wives" whom the government of the CSA promised to care for in exchange for their menfolk's military service. It was also a fight they vigilantly took on to ensure their own financial au-tonomy, economic stability, and survival.”

“They had an immense economic stake in the continued enslavement of African Americans, and they struggled to find ways to preserve the system when the Civil War threatened to the institution of slavery and their wealth along with it”

“Yet every time a white woman chose to buy and sell slaves, provide a slave trader with goods or services, or prostitute the bodies of the enslaved females she owned, she contradicted the sentimental or maternal view of the white woman’s relationship with slaves and the institution as a whole”