Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs

by Brown, Kathleen M.

• ISBN13: 9780807846230
• ISBN10: 0807846236
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-11-01
• Publisher: Omohundro Inst of Early Amer

Summary

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, Virginia's colonial government tried to reinforce its authority by regulating the labor and sexuality of English servants and by making legal distinctions between English and African women. This practice, along with making slavery hereditary through the mother, contributed to the cultural shift whereby women of African descent assumed from lower-class English women both the burden of fieldwork and the stigma of moral corruption. Brown's analysis extends through Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, an important juncture in consolidating the colony's white male public culture, and into the eighteenth century. She demonstrates that, despite elite planters' dominance, wives, children, free people of color, and enslaved men and women continued to influence the meaning of race and class in colonial Virginia.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Illustrations and Tables	xiii
Abbreviations and Notes on the Text	xv
Introduction	1	(12)
PART I. GENDER FRONTIERS
Gender and English Identity on the Eve of Colonial Settlement	13	(29)
The Anglo-Indian Gender Frontier	42	(33)
``Good Wives'' and ``Nasty Wenches'': Gender and Social Order in a Colonial Settlement	75	(32)
PART II. ENGENDERING RACIAL DIFFERENCE
Engendering Racial Difference, 1640-1670	107	(30)
Vile Rogues and Honorable Men: Nathaniel Bacon and the Dilemma of Colonial Masculinity	137	(50)
From ``Foul Crimes'' to ``Spurious Issue'': Sexual Regulation and the Social Construction of Race	187	(25)
``Born of a Free Woman'': Gender and the Politics of Freedom	212	(35)
PART III. CLASS AND POWER IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Marriage, Class Formation, and the Performance of Male Gentility	247	(36)
Tea Table Discourses and Slandeous Tongues: The Domestic Choreography of Female Identities	283	(36)
Anxious Partiarchs	319	(48)
Afterword	367	(8)
Notes	375	(98)
Index	473