Gendering the master narrative

Abstract

KATHLEEN BROWN'S GOOD WIVES, NASTY WENCHES, AND ANXIous PATRIARCHS: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia is representative of new gender history that fundamentally challenges our definition of southern politics. Brown, like many of her generation, forces gender history into the mainstream by writing grand narrative. Responding to Joan Scott, these scholars demonstrate that gender is a useful category of historical analysis by systematically restructuring the cornerstones of southern history. This emphasis on politics is as much tactical as an analytical maneuver. Each scholar focuses her or his attention on some of the most time honored subjects of southern political history-the origins of slavery, the Nullification Crisis, the origins of the Civil War, the Populist revolt, and politics of Jim Crow. Together, they convincingly argue that gender is integral to the structure and expression of power. By redefining history's most hallowed domain, they have caught the attention of the profession and won the top prizes given out by the Organization of American Historians and American Historical Association.1 Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs serves as an example of all the promise and perils of this new direction in gender studies. Brown is not content merely to augment or to challenge the standing interpretation of her topic. Instead she rewrites the master