Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs

Kathleen M. Brown argues in this study that gender and race became intertwined components of the social order in colonial Virginia over roughly 150 years. The book traces two related processes: the role of gender in creating racial slavery and the intensification of patriarchal authority, or the rule of the father over his household, among the colony's wealthy planter class. Brown contends that English beliefs about the proper roles of men and women were integral to defining racial categories and establishing slavery, and that slavery in turn reinvigorated patriarchal social relations. By the mid-eighteenth century, gender and race mutually supported the claims of a slaveholding elite. Drawing on county court records, wills, planters' papers, promotional tracts, and travelers' accounts from Virginia's Tidewater region, the coastal plain along the Chesapeake Bay, Brown organizes the study in three parts spanning from Elizabethan England through the mid-eighteenth century.

The first part examines what Brown calls "gender frontiers," encounters between culturally specific systems of gender that occurred as English settlers met Indigenous and African peoples. Brown begins in sixteenth-century England, where writers drew analogies from the subordination of women to men to explain the naturalness of the political order, comparing the father's household authority to the king's over his subjects. During economic upheaval marked by population growth, enclosure, and declining wages, lawmakers enforced ideals of female domesticity through vagrancy laws, advice literature, and community punishments of disorderly women. The yeoman ideal of the industrious "good wife," whose domestic labor anchored household and community order, became a defining feature of English national identity as the English embarked on imperial ventures in Ireland and the Americas. Brown argues that encounters with the Gaelic Irish and West Africans constituted early gender frontiers: English observers used gender discourses to distinguish their own civility from alleged barbarism, portraying Irish nomadism and women's labor patterns as evidence of uncivilized life, while accounts of West Africans were shaped primarily by mercantile rivalries rather than systematic racial ideology.

When English settlers arrived in Virginia in 1607, they confronted the Powhatan Indians, Algonquian-speaking peoples whose paramount chief, Powhatan, had consolidated several groups under his authority. Among the Powhatans, women cultivated corn, which provided the majority of calories consumed, and maintained households, while men hunted, fished, and fought. Brown argues that Powhatan's chiefdom-building tactics were already eroding women's power before the English arrived: He appropriated corn, controlled trade in prestige items, and married women from affiliated villages to consolidate alliances. English promotional literature depicted Indian men as insufficiently masculine for failing to farm and feminized the land as "virgin," yet the predominantly male English settlement depended on Indian corn and remained vulnerable to Indian military tactics. Struggles over corn's distribution became central to the power dynamics between the two groups, as Powhatan used food as leverage while the English sought to redefine corn as tribute or plunder.

Brown uses the 1629 case of Thomas/ine Hall, a servant of ambiguous sex who had alternated between male and female identities, to illustrate how gender distinctions were fundamental to social order in early Virginia. The General Court imposed a permanent hybrid identity on Hall, ordering the wearing of men's breeches with a woman's cap and apron. Meanwhile, the Virginia Company recruited English women to stabilize the colony, reasoning that wives would make male settlers more permanent. Despite promoters' claims that women performed domestic work, Virginia's tobacco economy undermined the English gender division of labor: Hoe agriculture erased the technological distinction between men's and women's agricultural roles. Brown argues that concepts of female domesticity proved resilient because they remained useful to promoters and settlers. The opposition between "good wives" and "nasty wenches" (2), originally class-based distinctions among English women, became central to emerging definitions of racial difference.

The second part traces how settlers created legal definitions of racial difference between the 1640s and 1690s. Brown argues that the 1643 tax levied on African women, from which English women were exempt, was the earliest distinctly unfavorable legal treatment of African people in Virginia. By classifying African women as field laborers equivalent to men, lawmakers assumed the English gender division of labor did not apply to Africans. The 1662 law declaring that children should follow the condition of the mother departed from English patrilineal tradition, which traced lineage through the father, rendering slave paternity legally irrelevant and making enslaved women the means by which slavery would be sustained. The 1667 statute declared that baptism did not alter a person's bondage, and the 1670 statute specified that all non-Christian servants imported by shipping would be enslaved for life, effectively limiting perpetual bondage to imported Africans.

Brown frames Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 as a crisis of colonial masculinity. Ordinary white men faced mounting impediments to independent householder status while frontier residents felt betrayed by the government of Governor William Berkeley, which monopolized political power and, in the view of backcountry settlers, failed to protect them from Indian attacks. When Nathaniel Bacon, a well-born newcomer, allied with backcountry protesters and launched campaigns against all Indians without Berkeley's authorization, open rebellion ensued. Women participated actively: Sarah Drummond, an outspoken rebel supporter, spread reports of Bacon's triumphs, while Bacon manipulated gender conventions by using loyalist wives as human shields during the siege of Jamestown. After Bacon's death and the arrival of royal commissioners, postrebellion laws stripped enslaved men of property ownership, gun possession, and access to white women, while gun ownership became an important basis for white male citizenship.

Brown then traces how postrebellion laws redirected sexual regulation toward policing racial boundaries. The 1691 statute prohibiting interracial marriages, the first Virginia law to use the term "white," prescribed severe punishments for English women bearing children by Black or mixed-race men. White servant women constituted at least 81 percent of interracial prosecutions between 1680 and 1710, while white men largely escaped punishment. Brown also examines free Afro-Virginians, whose existence challenged the correlation of slavery with Blackness. The 1723 Assembly disenfranchised free Black men, revoked tax exemptions for free Black women, and restricted manumission, the formal freeing of enslaved people. Governor William Gooch defended these measures as aiming "to preserve a decent Distinction" (221) between free Black people and whites. Brown contends that free Black women became crucial to their children's freedom because laws prohibiting interracial marriages made children of such unions automatically illegitimate, elevating the importance of maternal ties. She documents free Black mothers' use of courts to arrange apprenticeships, protect children from abusive masters, and establish public records of their families' free status.

The third part examines gentry culture in the early to mid-eighteenth century. Brown argues that strategic intermarriage was vital to class formation, with elite families cementing alliances through carefully negotiated unions. Plantation architecture expressed male authority: Georgian-style brick mansions separated domestic work spaces staffed by enslaved women from the white family's living quarters. White men participated in a public culture of horse racing, cockfighting, and militia musters that had no female equivalent, while women constituted their own communities through gossip and visiting. Brown argues this female subculture usually regulated conduct in ways that preserved patriarchal hierarchies rather than challenged them.

In the final chapter, Brown contends that elite planters derived power from landownership, control over sexual access to women, rights to enslaved labor, and access to political life, yet could never achieve the domestic tranquility they idealized. The secret diary of elite planter William Byrd II reveals how sexual acts communicated male power, while master-slave relationships relied on outright coercion. Yet enslaved people redirected patriarchal authority by collaborating to protect each other, pressing claims to remain near family members, and forcing a grudging recognition of slave family integrity into planter discourse.

Brown concludes that Virginia planters entered the imperial crisis leading to the American Revolution with an interpretation of power rooted in gender, race, and slavery. Their metaphoric invocations of "slavery" and "womanhood" to describe their relationship to Britain obscured the foundational relationship between enslaved African women and elite white men. The political subject recognized by the Constitution was defined in contrast to seemingly natural dependents: He was not enslaved and not a woman. The separation of domestic from political relationships protected the fiction that political manhood was a matter of natural rights rather than the product of historical power relations.