Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl. By Harriet A Jacobs. Boston: Thayer & Eldridge. 1861. (L Maria Child and Jean Fagan Yellin eds, Harvard Univ. Press 1987). Pp xxxiii, 306. $22.50. They Were Her Property: White Women As Slave Owners In The American South. By Stephanie E Jones-Rogers. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2019. Pp xx, 296. $30. Sexism and the abuse of male power, in part, define the American experience. Historically, sexism (and racism) pervaded legislative and judicial decisionmaking, shaping law and how we understand it. Laws that permitted marital rape and wife beatings buttressed those that forbade women from voting, becoming lawyers, and more. In this way, what male legislators imagined, male judges authorized. The reach of masculinity, domination, and power so permeates American thought that it obscures the ways in which women wield and abuse power – historically and in the present …
Michele Goodwin, A Different Type of Property: White Women and the Human Property They Kept, 119 Michigan Law Review 1081 (2021).
First posted 2021-05-08 15:30:53
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