been conspicuously absent: women, both enslaved and free. This project places women's labor at the center of the antebellum … slave trade, focusing particularly on slave traders' ability to profit from enslaved women's domestic, reproductive, and … sexual labor. Alexandra J. Finley shows how women often performed the foundational labor necessary to the functioning of the …

"Bridging women's history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument … about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show … that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South's slave …