Virginian Luxuries: Sex and Power in a Slave Society

This is a book teeming with ambition. In revisiting the history of colonial Virginia from an explicitly gendered perspective, Kathleen Brown’s aim is nothing less than a sweeping reinterpretation of the entire Anglo-American colonial enterprise—from its inception in the minds and actions of metropolitan policymakers through its early struggles with strange lands and alien peoples to its momentous and tragic encounter with slavery. Gender—the always political but seemingly natural arrangement of social, cultural, and physical signifiers of maleness and femaleness—shaped not only the way British officials and adventurers saw the “virgin” land of the New World and its savage inhabitants, but also the political institutions, social relationships, and labor systems they established in order to tame that World and subdue its peoples. “From the moment English men and women stepped on foreign shores, fundamental beliefs in the naturalness of English gender roles played a crucial part in the unfolding drama of encounter and settlement,” Brown writes (p. 7).

In her hands, gender assumes the status of a “metalanguage” (that is, a language of social difference that subsumes other sets of social relations) during the formative years of overseas exploration and colonization, offering a naturalized justification for the seizure and exploitation of “other” peoples and places, until it is replaced by race as an even more powerful way of conceptualizing difference and inscribing power after the transition to slavery. ¹ Although Brown is careful to treat gender and race as “overlapping and related social categories” rather than as “variables competing for analytical supremacy” (p. 4), the larger story she tells is of the discursive subordination (if not displacement) of gender by race as the determinative metalanguage of colonial society and politics. If, on the eve of English exploration, discourses of gender were “more pervasive, systematically articulated, and politically useful than those of race,” by 1750 “gender remained an important social category, but its political uses had been equaled, perhaps even supplanted, by race” (pp. 5, 1).

It is a story that, in all the richness of detail, recalls the other grand narrative of colonial Virginia, Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom (1976). The influence of Morgan’s powerful reading of Virginia’s “ordeal,” the wrenching transition to slave labor and the concomitant reordering of Virginia society along the axis of racial difference, is everywhere apparent in Brown’s book. Like Morgan, she identifies Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 as the key turning point in the colony’s political trajectory, the resolution of which placed the colony firmly on the path toward a new racial (and, she adds, gender) order. In this new order the political and social privileges of white men (the right to vote, to bear arms, to own the fruits of their labor, and to discipline their dependents) would be defined not only by reference to their racial prerogatives but also by their possession of a masculinity that consisted in the rights denied to African men. Virginia’s planter elite enacted their own “possessive investment in whiteness” in the decades following the brutal suppression of Bacon’s Rebellion as they passed laws to create a male popular culture delimited by sexual access to women and martial prowess: thus the increasingly harsh prosecution of interracial sex (especially that between white women and black men) in the 1690s and the early 1700s, and the progressive curtailment of the rights of free black men to vote, own property, participate in public bodies, and—most crucially—own guns.

The net effect of these various legal reforms was to enshrine patriarchy at the ideological core of Virginia’s slave society. The reinvigoration of patriarchy in eighteenth-century Virginia is a familiar story whose basic contours were laid out by Rhys Isaac and Allan Kulikoff some years ago and since then explored in more psychological depth by Kenneth...