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  • Gendering the Master Narrative
  • Nancy Bercaw (bio)
Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia by Kathleen M. Brown. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. 496 pages. $49.95 (cloth). $19.95 (paper).

Kathleen Brown’s Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia is representative of a 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 a 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 a 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 [End Page 228] narrative. Tackling one of the most complex topics in American history, Brown revisits the origins of racial slavery in Virginia so ably and creatively addressed by the likes of Winthrop Jordan and Edmund Morgan. 2 Building on these earlier works, Brown states that gender relations served as “critical tools” in the construction of race and class in Virginia. Brown’s argument is twofold. First, she suggests that gender served as the template for structuring and naturalizing racial slavery in the seventeeth-century. Second, she argues that racial slavery, once in place, reconfigured the very gender relations that shaped it. As gender and race act upon one another throughout the text, the patriarchal household maintains its place as the cornerstone of social order. Indians, slavery, tobacco, rebellion, and unruly women alter its foundations, but the household’s position in legitimizing political, economic, and social power remains intact.

The results are breathtaking. Brown injects gender into the mainstream of American history, making it impossible to dismiss. Her careful research and argument make a convincing case that colonial history cannot be fully understood without close attention to the discourses and structures of gender relations. Brown can only be admired for taking on such a difficult and ambitious assignment.

Mainstreaming, however, comes at a cost. The close focus on traditional seats of power—politics, the household, patriarchy, and the state—places much of society outside the field of vision. Our understanding of power is expanded as gender and domestic space are included, but in the process new borders are created.

Reaching across disciplines, Brown examines the many facets of the usually flat and ubiquitous term “power.” One can see the influence of three dominant strands of gender history on Brown’s work—the cultural studies approach epitomized by Joan Scott, a more structural account of patriarchy as explored by Gerda Lerner, and finally a growing literature of household studies influenced by the work of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Brown is not clearly aligned with any one of these perspectives; instead, she selects her analytical tools to suit the problem at hand. In the process, however, Brown presents a complex portrait of power, defining it in terms of discourses, structures, and social relations. Understandably, it is difficult to balance all three definitions at once, so Brown picks and chooses as her study develops.

Brown explores the changing nature of power relations in three chronological sections: “Gender Frontiers”; “Engendering Racial Difference”; and “Class and Power in the Eighteenth Century.” The sections discuss [End Page 229] three different historical problems and adopt three different methodological frameworks. Together, they present a powerful narrative about the role...

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