Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia
Kathleen Brown examines the origins of racism and slavery in British North America from the perspective of gender. Both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, gender helped determine the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery in Virginia. But the rise of racial slavery also transformed gender relations, including ideals of masculinity.\ In response to the presence of Indians, the shortage of labor, and the insecurity of social rank,...
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Based on the perspective of gender, this compelling study examines the origins of racism and slavery in colonial Virginia from 1676 to the eighteenth century. According to Brown, gender is both a basic social relationship and a model for social hierarchies and it therefore helped determine the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery legally, politically, as well as socially. Grace Elizabeth Hale ...[S]uggestive but ultimately frustrating....Brown usefully charts the shifting legal and social terrain of labor in the colony, as conceptions of women's work...competed with the demands of tobacco culture (Grace Elizabeth Hale is a professor at the University of Virginia). — Mississippi Quarterly
Based on the perspective of gender, this compelling study examines the origins of racism and slavery in colonial Virginia from 1676 to the eighteenth century. According to Brown, gender is both a basic social relationship and a model for social hierarchies and it therefore helped determine the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery legally, politically as well as socially.
AcknowledgmentsIllustrations and TablesAbbreviations and Notes on the TextIntroduction11Gender and English Identity on the Eve of Colonial Settlement132The Anglo-Indian Gender Frontier423"Good Wives" and "Nasty Wenches": Gender and Social Order in a Colonial Settlement754Engendering Racial Difference, 1640-16701075Vile Rogues and Honorable Men: Nathaniel Bacon and the Dilemma of Colonial Masculinity1376From "Foul Crimes" to "Spurious Issue": Sexual Regulation and the Social Construction of Race1877"Born of a Free Woman": Gender and the Politics of Freedom2128Marriage, Class Formation, and the Performance of Male Gentility2479Tea Table Discourses and Slanderous Tongues: The Domestic Choreography of Female Identities28310Anxious Patriarchs319Afterword367Notes375Index473
\ From the Publisher[S]he has transformed even the very familiar by her original thinking and her command of recent theoretical formulations.\ Signs\ [C]rucial to our understanding not only of gender but of race and power in colonial Virginia.\ Journal of Southwest Georgia History\ Meticulously researched, carefully reasoned, and gracefully written, this book should be on the reading list of every historian.\ American Historical Review\ This big book is intriguing, provocative, and deeply unsettling.\ Journal of Southern History\ Should be a standard purchase for all academic libraries with holdings in U.S. history.\ Choice\ \ \ \ \ \ Grace Elizabeth Hale...[S]uggestive but ultimately frustrating....Brown usefully charts the shifting legal and social terrain of labor in the colony, as conceptions of women's work...competed with the demands of tobacco culture (Grace Elizabeth Hale is a professor at the University of Virginia). — Mississippi Quarterly\ \ \ Grace Elizabeth Hale...[S]uggestive but ultimately frustrating....Brown usefully charts the shifting legal and social terrain of labor in the colony, as conceptions of women's work...competed with the demands of tobacco culture (Grace Elizabeth Hale is a professor at the University of Virginia). -- Mississippi Quarterly\ \
