Customer Reviews

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American Hist)

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Kathleen Brown's examination of 17th and early 18th century Virginia is a commendable attempt to further our understanding of gender and race relations in early American history. "Gender and race," Brown finds, "became intertwined components of the social order in colonial Virginia." (1) Although this study makes significant strides in unearthing the world of free and bonded men and women in early Virginia, many of Brown's conclusions go far beyond the evidence she can muster.
This story is primarily one of definitions, structured so that one can see clearly the gradual but steady consolidation of power by elite white men. These "anxious patriarchs" delineated social relations among whites, blacks and Indians by associating Indians and Africans with field labor and slavery, and by associating women with dependency. "Good wives" were respectable, chaste and dependent members of a male-dominated society. As time went on, planters engendered field work with race, by disassociating white women from it. As the number of enslaved Africans increased, black women became "nasty wenches" who, because of their condition of servitude, could not avoid the labor and sexual exploitation that defined their status. By the 1680s, she shows, taxation of African (but not white) women became the "cornerstone of a concept of womanhood that became less class-specific and increasingly race specific," which allowed for a "more exclusive definition of English womanhood." (128) This concept was further buttressed when Virginia lawmakers in 1662 decreed that children born of unfree mothers were slaves. "The notion that enslaved women could pass their bound condition on to their children," she writes, "strengthened the appearance that slavery was a natural condition for" Africans." (135)
Brown is persuasive in her discussion of Virginia patriarchs, who by the first half of the 18th century had subordinated women to secondary public and private roles. "Outspoken women" of any race were threats to masculine authority, particularly in the form of slander and public immorality. Male power was based not only on "rights to the labor of slaves and servants," (323) but on domination of their wives and daughters as well. "Control over sexual access to women" (323) and a managerial role in marriage arrangements exemplify their position of power, which Brown points out was solidified by slave ownership.
Brown provides many intriguing glimpses into the lives of men and women, slaves and freemen in colonial Virginia, especially with the numerous vignettes unearthed in court records, newspapers and diaries. In a number of instances she makes excellent use of her evidence, such as the case of William Bass, Sr.'s will (242-3), in which Brown finds that an unusual inheritance provision reveals much about how one family self-identified in terms of race. In another case, she uses a sharp decline in white servant court appearances to suggest the rapid expansion of slave labor in Lancaster County. (251)
Nevertheless, several factors combine to make Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs unsatisfying. Many of Brown's chapter introductions are jargon-filled, lack clarity and should have been used as conclusions instead. Furthermore, she bases her thesis primarily on only three Virginia counties (York, Lancaster and Norfolk) and just two planters (William Byrd II and Landon Carter), which perhaps makes for too few resources from which to make many of her often sweeping generalizations. For example, her suggestion that "skin color had yet to acquire much of its moral and political freight" (215) during the late 16th century is based solely on one councilor's commentary in one county.
More troubling is Brown's frequent willingness to make conclusions beyond what the evidence will bear. Her regular use of "may have" in her prose warns of this problem. African females' field work "possibly may have" affected a slave woman's chances for marriage, Brown claims with little support. (126) She bases part of her discussion of 17th century bastardy court cases on "a few shards of evidence." (191) When describing free women and their families, she points to "West African matrifocal residence patterns" in explaining the absence of black males from households-yet fails to elaborate or provide evidence of this alleged trend. (229) Did enslaved women resent serving tea to "young white ladies" in fine homes? (286) Possibly, but Brown produces no documentary evidence to make such a suggestion. Finally, that "English women appear to have managed their sexual activities carefully with an eye toward the future," is unfortunately an all-too-typical speculation. (100)
In addition to making a number of questionable assertions based on limited evidence, Brown also includes enough overly-speculative claims to weaken the book's overall credibility. The contention that women appearing alone in public "threatened to disturb the scripting of male hierarchies" (281) is of debatable veracity, as is the assertion that only when gentlewomen could no longer bear children could they "be granted the freedom to leave the house" as they wished." (282) Her assertion that a newspaper report of a giant cucumber constitutes "implicit phallic imagery" of "colonial masculinity" (329) is not only absurd but is a lapse of historical professionalism as well.
Brown's inventive effort to study colonial Virginia in terms of gender and race is a valuable attempt to look at social constructions in an innovative light and raises as many questions as it answers.

Covering an impressive range of materials, Brown offers an ambitious treatment of later 17th- and 18th- century colonial Virginia from the point of view of the marxist-feminist tetrad: race, gender, sexuality, class. As the book's title tends to suggest, the work is strongest when dealing with the connections between discourses of gender and race (and to a lesser extent, sexuality). The wide scope of the book means, however, that some of the nuances and complexities of these discourses and their connections (and this is particularly true in terms of 'class') remain untraced. A second weakness is that the text lacks wider direction. Perhaps we can excuse the absence of explicit discussion of the study's theoretical assumptions. Less so the failure to engage directly with previous historiography and to 'signpost' clearly the argument being made over 375-odd pp. Subheadings help but only when descriptive; those drawn from primary sources are of little value in guiding the reader.

Great stories, such rich details, well written. It's a thick book that will take some time to get through, but it's a fun journey.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Anglo-American discourses of gender, race and power underwent major historical transformations; authority was no longer the "natural" expression of divine providence, and in the New World beliefs in fundamental sex differences acquired new meanings. As Kathleen M. Brown makes clear in her work, this was no simple transition; rather, the language of gender "became part of English efforts to define differences, communicate their own authority, and anchor their identities in Christianity and civility" in a land of unfamiliar land and peoples. Brown aims at nothing less than a revisioning of colonial Virginian society during this crucial early modern period by placing gender at the center of historical analysis of that "virgin" colony, Virginia, from the arrival of the earliest colonial settlers to the mid-eighteenth century, when the gentry elite reached the apex of their power. This work's novelty lies in Brown's insistence on gender as crucial in the demarcation of the sexual, racial, and class boundaries. However, Brown is not writing a "women's history" in the traditional sense; one of the strengths of her text is her insistence on the interconnectedness of gender, race, sex, and class. Thus some of her most provocative arguments examine the construction of white masculinity, notably during and after Bacon's rebellion. Brown ultimately succeeds in her goal to "complicate" our understanding of the initial setbacks in patriarchal social hierarchies, the "subsequent rise of the planter class and its authority,"and the ways in which race, class and gender shaped colonial society in this formidable work.

In her book, Kathleen Brown offers a revision of colonial Virginia history. Relying almost entirely upon previously known and explored primary materials, she constructs an argument that gender heavily influenced colonial development.

Breaking her book up chronologically into three parts, Brown focuses first on England and the Virginia colony's early days. In discussing the former, she establishes the role of women who adhere to social behavioral norms as that of good wives, and those who do not adhere to those norms as nasty wenches. In the case of Virginia, she explores the role of women in English society vis a vis Powhatan's Algonquian society. When Powhatan offered women to English settlers, whether for marriage or a night's enjoyment, he did so for political reasons; the settlers, however, thought Indians valued women less, and differently, than they did. Settlers further grappled with the fact that women farmed while men, they thought, took it easy, hunting and fishing.

The second part focuses on the change in roles of women, and the corresponding change in how men though of them. As Virginia became more permanent, and as slaves became more prevalent, "good wives" came to mean the elite women, whereas "nasty wenches" meant servant or non-elite women. Following Bacon's Rebellion, this labeling shifted somewhat as elite men attempted to break the unofficial alliance between black slaves and white servants. Principally, the violations of white women that formerly would have made them nasty wenches now were less serious, while those same violations of black women were more so.

The last part explores the domination of men and the lives of elite women. Men became much more patriarchal, establishing social norms and laws to that effect. They were "anxious" in the sense that they were now required to hold domination over their wives, families, and farms, and maintain strict adherence to those norms and laws. Relying heavily on the writings of William Byrd II and Landon Carter, Brown points out the fears these men had of declining virility, disobedient sons, and the like. Women, meanwhile, came together against their husbands, quietly undermining them on occasions, especially in discipline issues, and generally developing a women's society of tea parties and such.

On the one hand, Brown's revisionist attempt is a worthwhile endeavor; only the foolish would say women had no role or impact whatsoever in colonial development. As historians have largely ignored or downplayed this role, her study is therefore relevant. On the other hand, she delves far too deeply into the sex lives of leading men. Her study was not one solely of the role of gender, but also of sexuality. To a certain and very limited extent that exploration is worthwhile-certainly the colonists were concerned with fornication, bastardy and the like-but do I, the reader, really need to know on which days Byrd gave his wife a "flourish," and whether or not he was "vigorous"? No. Furthermore, certain inherent flaws exist in a reinterpretation that relies heavily on modern and liberal views of sex and sexuality. Consequently, there are certain aspects of the book that are worth reading, but one should select those aspects carefully.

And schizophrenic. Parts of the book are interesting. Parts of the book that should be interesting are wound up in high-falutin' academical type jargon. A popular history this isn't.

An insightful approach to gender analysis in colonial virginia, which questions our contemporary categories of race, gender and orientation. A bit longwinded at times, but still worth reading. A good companion for understanding race, religion and gender in the American South.