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The buyers flocked to the slave auctions held at the Georgia estate, eager to inspect the human property on display.

There were cooks, carriage drivers, washer women and ladies’ maids. The trader — a woman named Annie Poore — paraded the Black captives before the buyers, haggled over prices and pocketed the profits. She was working in a field dominated by men. But that did not dissuade her from pursuing a thriving business in Black bodies.

She “was all [the] time sellin’,” Tom Hawkins, one of the people enslaved by Ms. Poore, recalled decades later. “She made ’em stand up on a block she kept in de back yard, whilst she was a-auctionin’ ’em off.”

For generations, scholars argued that white women were rarely involved in the active buying and selling of Black people. But a growing body of research is challenging that narrative, documenting the significant role that white women played in the American slave trade.

Between 1856 and 1861, white women engaged in nearly a third of the sales and purchases of enslaved people in New Orleans, which was home to the nation’s largest slave market at the time, according to a working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research earlier this year.

In 1830, white women accounted for about 16 percent of the purchases and sales of enslaved people in New Orleans, the study found. Elsewhere, an analysis of runaway slave advertisements published between 1853 and 1860, which were compiled by the Black abolitionist William Still, found that white women were listed as owners in about 12 percent of the listings.