Beyond the Great Debates: Gender and Race in Early America

Abstract

Several debates animated the early American history I studied as a graduate student in the mid-1980s. Two of these captured my imagination, eventually drawing me from nineteenthand twentieth-century women's history to the study of gender and race in the colonial period. The first focused on the status of women, by historians usually meant white women. Turning on the acceptance or rejection of the so-called golden age theory, posited that early American women enjoyed a brief period of high status relative to both their English sisters and their nineteenth-century counterparts, this debate pitted scholars who believed women's lives had deteriorated after 1800 against those who thought women's lives had been equally dismal before 1800. Nothing less than the assignment of blame for women's subordination was at stake. Were the root causes of that subordination already in place when the English settled North America? Or could a significant portion of the blame be laid at the door of industrial capitalism?1 The second debate that brought colonial history to life for me was an older debate about the emergence of racial slavery in the southern colonies. Often put as simply as which came first, racism or slavery, this debate assessed the reasons for the turn to slave labor and the consequences that followed from it. Was chattel slavery the inevitable result of the deep-rooted racial prejudice of seventeenth-century British planters? Or did racial prejudice arise only after planters had embraced slavery as their new labor system? Like the debate over women's status, this known to many as the debate, was as much about origins as causes, compelling historians to offer a chronology of when racial inequality began.2 Although these debates had much in common, key differences distinguished them. Whereas the debate over women's status revolved around implicit comparisons of colonial women to their antebellum counterparts, thus inviting comment from specialists in both time periods, the origins debate had been first and foremost a discussion among colonial historians about slavery in early America, an agenda that set them apart from scholars of antebellum slavery. Second, in contrast to the newness of the debate over women's status and the continued interest of scholars in it throughout the