- New Arrivals
Fiction- Historical FictionCrime & ThrillersMysteryScience-FictionFantasyPoetryRomanceChildren’s BooksYoung Adult
- Biographies & MemoirsHistoryCurrent AffairsTech & ScienceBusinessSelf-DevelopmentTravelThe ArtsFood & WineReligion & SpiritualitySportsHumor
Children’s BooksListsBlogGift CardsMy ListsGames- About & Help
- About Tertulia
- Membership & Co-Ownership
- Shipping & Delivery
- Orders & Payments
- Contact Support
- Send App Feedback
- Follow us
- Download the app
The co-op bookstore for avid readers
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, 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.
Book Details
- Publisher: Omohundro Institute and Unc Press
- Publish Date: Nov 25th, 1996
- Pages: 512
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.20in - 6.10in - 1.20in - 1.65lb
- EAN: 9780807846230
- Categories: • Gender Studies• United States - Colonial Period (1600-1775)• Women's Studies
About the Author
Brown, Kathleen M.: - Kathleen M. Brown is associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.
Praise for this book
[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"
ÝS¨he has transformed even the very familiar by her original thinking and her command of recent theoretical formulations.
"Signs"
ÝC¨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""
[S]he has transformed even the very familiar by her original thinking and her command of recent theoretical formulations.
"Signs"