Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs

Kathleen M. Brown. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996; published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA.

The role of racism and slavery in establishing the social order in colonial Virginia was already well understood at the time Brown published this provocative study, which argued that gender and race were actually "intertwined components of the social order" (1) which reinforced and informed each other in the construction of the white, patriarchal gentry class which came to dominate society.

Brown anchors her analysis in the English experience in Ireland and the first encounters with American Indians. Beginning with those early interactions with non-English "others", a dichotomy began to develop contrasting English "masculinity" with the less virile, less assertive, less powerful "femininity" of conquered peoples, whether the Catholic Irish or the "pagan" Indians. Gender, then, became the conceptual basis of legitimacy in that maleness was presumed to have a natural mastery over femaleness.

The ways in which this early formulation informed and shaped the development of colonial Virginia as the institution of slavery developed was complex; Brown traces this process through the seventeenth century, particularly focusing on Bacon's Rebellion which she regards as pivotal for many reasons, including because it hastened the identification between full citizenship and the ability and right to bear arms in defense of rights. This right would soon become restricted to white men; one of many steps along the path in which black men would be stripped of the prerogatives of maleness even as black women were denied the status of womanhood which was increasingly restricted to white women--and even then, not all white women. There was a class component at play, but in the end race and gender would triumph over any possibility of a repeat of the Bacon's Rebellion alliance between white indentured servants and African slaves.

The society which emerged would be ruled over by a confident, united gentry class which was at the peak of its powers between 1700 and 1750. It was a gentry in which marriage served to maintain ties and class unity at the top, as well as uniting family fortunes. Marriage was monitored and negotiated by parents and society in order to protect family positions in the upper reaches of the social hierarchy, and gender roles were closely guarded in order to protect the interests of the planter class.