Nasty Wenches Research Articles

Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789. Cornelia Hughes DaytonFounding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society. Mary Beth NortonGood Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Kathleen M. BrownDispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790. Jean M. O'Brien

<i>Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789</i>. Cornelia Hughes Dayton<i>Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society</i>. Mary Beth Norton<i>Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia</i>. Kathleen M. Brown<i>Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790</i>. Jean M. O'Brien

Plotting William Byrd

IN the closing chapters of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, Kathleen M. Brown concludes, from a reading of William Byrd's diaries, that between I739 and I74I-though Byrd was, to all appearances, contentedly married and nearing seventy-he frequently engaged in sexual activity with enslaved women.1 Byrd was undeniably anxious at many points in his life, and, on at least occasion, writing to Charles Boyle after his return to Virginia in I726, he famously compared himself to one of the patriarchs.2 The term nasty wenches never appears in Byrd's diaries or other writings, but, in view of the conclusion that Brown draws about his sexual conduct, he would seem to exemplify the exploitative habits and invidious attitudes that her title evokes-habits and attitudes that Brown finds largely confirmed by the major literary works of Byrd's life, The History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina and The Secret History of the Line.3 William Byrd has come to share, with Thomas Jefferson, the dubious distinction of being our representative eighteenth-century planter-libertine.4 But such a reading of Byrd imposes a degree of clarity on the textual evidence that, in some respects, resembles the artificial order that a surveyor's

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. |Based on the perspective of gender, this compelling study examines the origins of racism and slavery in colonial Virginia from 1676 to the eighteenth century. According to Brown, gender is both a basic social relationship and a model for social hierarchies and it therefore helped determine the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery legally, politically, as well as socially.

Kathleen M. Brown. &lt;italic&gt;Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia&lt;/italic&gt;. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia. 1996. Pp. xvi, 496. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95

Kathleen M. Brown. &lt;italic&gt;Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia&lt;/italic&gt;. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia. 1996. Pp. xvi, 496. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95

Gendering the master narrative

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

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs. By Kathleen M. Brown (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. xvi plus 496pp. $49.94/cloth $19.95/paperback)

Journal Article Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs. By Kathleen M. Brown (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. xvi plus 496pp. $49.94/cloth $19.95/paperback) Get access Kenneth Lockridge Kenneth Lockridge University of Montana Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 31, Issue 3, Spring 1998, Pages 730–733, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh/31.3.730 Published: 01 March 1998

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia.

Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia, Chapel Hill, published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pp. xv, 496.

Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia, Chapel Hill, published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pp. xv, 496. - Volume 8 Issue 2

Good wives, nasty wenches, and anxious patriarchs: gender, race, and power in Colonial Virginia

Good wives, nasty wenches, and anxious patriarchs: gender, race, and power in Colonial Virginia

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia