The Journal of the Civil War Era

An Intimate Economy is exciting and innovative, well worthy of a place in the growing canon of work on U.S. gender and slavery that centers women in American development. Finley provides a necessary intervention in the history of the domestic slave trade through her unique and detailed probing of women’s multiple roles in this trade, so often overlooked by prior historians. Her original and poignant telling of women’s stories conveys in microcosm a wider picture of gendered commodification and exploitation that undergirded the regime. Focusing on the late antebellum era and on case studies of major slave markets in Richmond, Virginia, and New Orleans, Louisiana, Finley’s meticulous research fosters a reconceptualization of the slave trade and the significance of gender within it. The case studies also highlight differences between the urban and agricultural South and the households therein.

The book focuses on the vitally important domestic and socially reproductive labor that enabled the financial success of the antebellum slave trade. Women contributed to commodification by providing the day-today labor necessary for the functioning of the trade, and they also became sexually commodified through forms of sexual slavery. Like others before her, Finley laments the lack of scholarly attention paid to enslaved women’s contributions to the development of American capitalism via slavery. Thankfully, this sense of injustice has now led to a growing number of works seeking to redress the omission, including this volume. The influence of pioneering feminist historians and economists on this book is clear. Finley uses ideas about overlapping social, domestic, and reproductive labor very effectively in addressing women’s vital roles in slavery’s development. Enslaved women fed, clothed, cleaned, and cared for other enslaved people, they housed traders, and they ensured that people being sold possessed clean, healthy, and well-dressed bodies. Women, therefore, experienced and interacted with the trade in numerous ways, especially in relation to socially reproductive labor.

Finley’s volume is slim, encompassing just four case studies of enslaved women involved in various aspects of the domestic trade. Her work is framed around four one-word, self-explanatory chapter titles: “Fancy,” [End Page 406] “Seamstress,” “Concubine,” and “Housekeeper.” The first chapter explores the multiple forms of labor women performed within the fancy trade—the sale of usually light-skinned enslaved women for sexual purposes—and focuses on Corinna Hinton Omohundro, who began her journey enslaved and later became a slave trader’s widow. Chapter 2 conveys the importance of needlework to traders through the clothes made by women, homing in on the Richmond trader Hector Davis. Sarah Ann Conner, the concubine of Theophilus Freeman in New Orleans, and her struggle for freedom anchor the third chapter, while the fourth chapter features Lucy Ann Cheatham, an enslaved domestic and concubine whose life overlapped Conner’s. All the examples address wider questions about women’s diverse roles, their changing legal and social status within their life cycles, their modes of resistance (which, Finley points out, could be coupled with accommodation), and the importance of women’s camaraderie as a means of survival. Many of the stories here are unforgettable. Especially poignant is the fact that New Orleans trader John Hatcher refused to allow his unnamed “trusty woman” to change the clothes of women for sale who were menstruating, presumably in case they stained them (49). Finley points out the irony of a situation whereby reproduction remained essential to women’s value, yet signs of it had to remain hidden.

The work is written in a lively and accessible style, with the more traditional format of opening vignettes. A larger volume might have included more evidence about the multiple ways in which enslaved women supported the trade, including more detail about cooks and wet nurses, for example. Finley might also have included testimony from WPA interviews with formerly enslaved people. It is regrettable that the introduction does...