Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and P

Gender, racetrack, and major power in compound VirginiaIn Colonial Virginia in 1661, Rebecca Nobles was sentenced to ten lashes for coach an illegitimate pip-squeak. Had she been an indentured retainer she would also have been ordered to process her master an additional two years to repay his losses incurred during her pregnancy. aft(prenominal) 1662, had she been an enslaved African woman she would not have been prosecuted, beca physical exertion in that year the Colonial govern ment declared children born to slave women the property of their m opposites master. A child born to a slave brought increased wealth, whereas the child of an indentured servant brought increased financial responsibility. This evolving legislation in Colonial Virginia reflected elite plantation owner interests in controlling womens sexuality for scotch gain. Race is also be and manipulated to reinforce the authority and economic power of elite white men who enacted colonial legislation. As his torian Kathleen M. Brown demonstrates in her book grave Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs, the designs of gender and aftermath intersect as colonial Virginians consolidated power and defined their society. Indeed, gender and race were integral to that goal. In particular, planter manipulations of social categories had a profound effect on the economic and political climate in Colonial Virginia. First, I want to get to that English settlers did not bring a concrete ideology of race to their new colony. As Brown explains, while English traders had contact with another(prenominal) peoples in Ireland and on the West African coast, the everyday English concept of race was very much abstract in the early seventeenth century. That is not to say that the English did not justify their domination of other peo... ...usion that race is deployed in the construction of power relations.* Indeed a metalanguage of race, to use Higginbothams term, was employed by colonial powers to define black women as sieve from English women, and that process is deconstructed in Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, Anxious Patriarchs. However, Browns synopsis rests mainly on the shifting English concepts of gender and race enforce on colonial society by the white elite, becoming at times a metalanguage of colonial gender. Nonetheless, Browns analysis of overlapping social constructions is elucidative for understanding the ways gender and race can be manipulated to reinforce dominant hierarchies. Works Cited*Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. African American Womens History and the Metalanguage of Race in Feminism and History, ed. Joan Wallach Scott (NY Oxford University Press, 1996), 201.