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

513 Pages·1996·32.35 MB·English

by  Kathleen M. Brown

GOOD WIVES, NASTY WENCHES,
AND ANXIOUS PATRIARCHS
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KATHLEEN M. BROWN
Good Wives, Nasty Wenches,
and Anxious Patriarchs
Gender, Race, and Power in
Colonial Virginia
Published for the
Omohundro Institute of Early American
History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia,
by the University of North Carolina Press,
Chapel Hill and London
The Omohundro Institute of Early American History
and Culture is sponsored jointly by the College of William and
Mary and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
© 1996 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book
Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brown, Kathleen M., 1960-
Good wives, nasty wenches, and anxious patriarchs : gender, race, and power
in colonial Virginia / Kathleen M. Brown.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8078-2.307-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8078-462.3-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
i. Virginia —History —Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775. 2- Sex role—Virginia—History.
3. Women—Virginia — Social conditions. 4. Virginia — Race relations.
5. Social classes—Virginia—History. I. Institute of Early American
History and Culture (Williamsburg, Va.) II. Title.
F2.29.68783 1996 96-16501
975-5'oz —dczo CIP
This volume received indirect support from an unrestricted book
publication grant awarded to the Institute by the L. J. Skaggs and
Mary C. Skaggs Foundation of Oakland, California.
cloth 06 05 04 03 oz 5 4 3 2, i
paper 06 05 04 03 oz 9 8 7 65
To Sheila Mahoney Brown
and to the memory of Catherine Cunningham Mahoney
and John Edward Mahoney
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A C K N O W L E D G M E N TS
Nearly ten years ago, I began incurring intellectual and financial debts in my
quest to write a dissertation on the gender history of colonial Virginia. Fund-
ing from the Graduate School and the Department of History at the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin, the Martha L. Edwards Memorial Scholarship Trust Fund,
a Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, the Lena Lake Forrest
Fellowship of the Business and Professional Women's Foundation, and the
National Society of Colonial Dames all made it possible for me to leave the
frozen climes of Wisconsin to conduct my research in Virginia and to return
again to embark on the writing. That I was in Wisconsin at all I owe to Gerda
Lerner, whose scholarship inspired me to enter graduate school and whose
creation of a women's history program provided me with an intellectual home
and the training I needed to become a scholar myself. That I needed to leave
Wisconsin for Virginia I owe to Charles L. Cohen, whose excellent seminar on
early American history convinced me of the need for more research on gender
in colonial America. A most generous and supportive third reader, William
Van Deburg, read drafts of chapters with lightning speed and helped to make
the process of dissertation writing more pleasant. In addition, I benefited from
the written comments of Steve J. Stern, who also served on the committee.
Since leaving Wisconsin, the debts have mounted. Three semesters of fund-
ing from the Institute of Early American History and Culture, including a year
funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and one semester of
leave from Princeton University enabled me to get back into the archives and
revise the dissertation. I am grateful to Daniel T. Rodgers and Jean B. Lee for
helping to arrange the schedule of teaching and leave during this three-year
period. The opportunity to participate in the intellectual life of these two very
different institutions was a tremendous aid to thinking about the book in dif-
ferent ways than I had thought about the dissertation.
In addition to this financial, institutional, and intellectual assistance, I am
very grateful to a host of helpful archivists and librarians at several different
locations. Staffs at the Virginia Historical Society, the Alderman Library at
the University of Virginia, the Library of Congress's Manuscript Division, and
the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library were generous and efficient.
The Research Division of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, especially
Linda Rowe and Kevin Kelly, gave me permission to use the transcripts of
York County court records and shared their expertise. Special thanks go to
the librarians at the Virginia State Library and Archives, who, under the adept
leadership of Conley Edwards, made many a long day in front of the microfilm
machines both productive and pleasant. I am also grateful to the State His-
torical Society of Wisconsin for making possible my use of interlibrary loan
viii Acknowledgments
materials and to Michael Edmunds, who took a flexible rather than punitive
approach to my borrowing privileges during the final semester of work on the
dissertation.
Many of the friends and colleagues whom I have imposed upon to read this
manuscript are as relieved as I that it is finally completed. Among the most
grateful, no doubt, are the people who read it in its entirety several times.
Gerda Lerner and Charles Cohen gamely slogged through the revised manu-
script and made excellent suggestions about how to improve it. Paul Clemens
generously read portions of the manuscript more than once and was can-
did with me about its strengths and its weaknesses. Outside readers for the
Institute of Early American History and Culture—Suzanne Lebsock, Philip
Schwarz, and, later, Drew Gilpin Faust and Allan Kulikoff—were generous
with their praise and judicious with their criticisms. Rutgers University col-
leagues Tom Slaughter and Philip Greven offered useful suggestions during the
final stages of revision. Members of the Rutgers Gender History discussion
group, especially Jan Lewis and Belinda Davis, helped me to make significant
improvements to Chapter 9.1 learned a great deal from John Selby's reading
of Chapter 5 and Kenneth Lockridge's detailed comments on several chapters.
Several people generously shared research, helped me with the management
of my data, or facilitated my archival work by giving me a place to stay. Emory
Evans, Michael L. Nicholls, and Kevin Kelly shared research notes and told
me about additional sources that helped me to flesh out the factual base of
portions of this manuscript. David Rawson extracted information from my
transcripts of the court records about the prosecutions of fathers, and Anna
Jarvis and Shawn Holl double-checked the cases listed in my databases against
these same transcripts. Page Parrish Wright, a Virginian who was always tre-
mendously hospitable to me, even when she secretly thought I was a "poor
Yankee child," took me into her home during the long months of research in
Richmond. Julie Richter, whose expertise on colonial Virginia is evident in
the work she has done for Colonial Williamsburg and her own careful scholar-
ship on York County, deserves special recognition for her unceasing kindness
and assistance. Not only did she provide me with a place to stay in Williams-
burg during the early days of my research and share her own findings, but she
subsequently read many chapter drafts and heard innumerable of my papers.
During the final phase of revisions, she read the entire revised manuscript and
saved me from several foolish errors.
I am also grateful to the following people for combinations of moral sup-
port, friendship, generosity of time, rigorous criticisms, and intellectually
stimulating conversation, which enabled me to see this project to comple-
tion: Steven Aron, Bob Buchanan, Sharon Block, Maureen Fitzgerald, Colin
Gordon, Martha Hodes, Maria Hoehn, Roger Horowitz, Walter Johnson,
Jennifer Jones, Susan Koerber, Marie Laberge, Liz Lunbeck, Earl Mulder-
Acknowledgments ix
ink, Jeanie O'Brien-Kehoe, Anne Lewis Osier, Thomas Ryan, David Schuyler,
Susan Selleck, Beverly Sensbach, Jon Sensbach, Jim Sidbury, Susan Smith,
Darren Staloff, Chris Stansell, Doris Stormoen, Peter Thompson, Marsha
Way, Tracey Weis, Michael Wilson, and Joel Wolfe. Nancy Hartog and Dirk
Hartog have, in addition to opening their New Jersey home to me, kept me
cheerful and sane during two years of simultaneous commuting and revising.
Nancy Isenberg and Saul Cornell, both separately and in combination, have
had an enormous intellectual impact upon me. Although this is not the book
that either one of them would have written about colonial Virginia, it has
been significantly influenced by their critiques of social history. Leslie Reagan
and Leslie Schwalm have provided the most consistent supply of all types of
assistance over the last eight years. Many of the ideas in this book took root
in conversations I had with each of them. I owe a special debt of gratitude to
Mary Keenan, a gifted teacher and scholar, whose enthusiasm for and mas-
tery of her subject ignited my interest in history.
Several chapters of the manuscript have benefited from the comments of
panelists and audiences at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians,
the Southern Historical Association conference, the Social Science Historians
Association conference, the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies,
and the Columbia Seminar on Early American History and Culture. The com-
ments of Tommy Bogger, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Joan Gunderson, Mick
Nicholls, and James Merrell were particularly helpful in making me rethink
the organization and emphasis of my arguments.
Portions of Chapter 2. appeared previously as "The Anglo-Indian Gender
Frontier," in Nancy Shoemaker, ed., Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspec-
tives on Native American Women (New York, 1994), 26-48, and appear here
with the permission of the publisher. Portions of Chapter 3 were previously
published in " 'Changed . . . into the Fashion of Man': The Politics of Sexual
Difference in a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Settlement," Journal of
the History of Sexuality, VI (1995), 171-193.
I owe many thanks to the hardworking people at the Institute of Early
American History and Culture for their efforts to make this book into a reality.
Ronald Hoffman has been the soul of kindness during the five years I have
known him. His words of wisdom have many times calmed my fears about
the process of publishing a first book. Sally Mason enlivened the Institute
with her irrepressible energy and boundless intelligence. My deepest gratitude
is to my editor, Fredrika Teute, whose dogged work on several versions of the
manuscript and incisive comments have made this a much better book than
it would otherwise have been. I have also enjoyed working with copyeditor
Virginia Montijo Chew, who pleasantly bore my incessant questions about
commas and hyphens and kindly provided whatever help was needed to get
the manuscript into shape. Although Gil Kelly did not get the chance to take