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CHAPTER SIX Consolidating Gender Each gossamer thread of a spider's web is intrinsically fine and imperrect . unly when it is artfully overlapped with countless others do the threads constitute a truly strong system, holding a form and substance that is captivating in its complexity—and capable of gripping all manner of unwaryprey. Lashing the threads together is really the easy part—most spiders can do it in about an hour. Starting the web is more awkward:a floating thread is attached to a branch or a leaf, and the spider must move away—walking, jumping, and dangling until it can anchor its first dragline to the other guylines. This process allows the web to span allkinds of encumbrances and assume an infinite variety of forms, yet it is a structure built with extremely small quantities of material; it is mainly empty space. By the end of the colonial era a web of race and gender defined the social framework of Georgia, in emulation of other southern colonies. Three critical guy lines had proved hard to anchor in previous decades, but, once established , societal conventions swiftly intermeshed around them: the demographic normalization of the white population during the royal era, the specialization of an economy that circumscribed female roles, and the effective encoding of racial difference. Interwoven were a variety of cultural devices, although they were limited by the physical constraints upon a society that sprawled from the Appalachians to the tidewater, from the Savannah River down to Florida, and through backcountry cabins, urban dwellings, and SeaIsland plantations. The growing number of concentric threads that confined late colonial Georgians to their "place" included slave codes, literature, religion, militia drilling, fashion and gentility, legislation, education, leisure patterns, courts of law, commercial networks—the list goes on. These cultural devices would create, monitor, uphold, and enforce distinctions, both consciously and subconsciously. In this chapter I will explore, insofar asthe sources permit, how several of these powerful devices operated, in order to describe the process of cultural standardization that took place. A NUMBER OF SCHOLARS have confronted the intersection of race and gender in recent years. Kathleen Brown has argued that gender and sexuality were 142 Consolidating Gender • 143 central to the development of both slavery and the plantation elite in the society of colonial Virginia. To borrow Kenneth Lockridge's phrase, Brown dramatized how "gender was the door through which a species of racism entered colonial Virginia" in the late seventeenth century.! The bodily differentiation and derogatory language (such as "wench") formerly used to delineate gender and class hierarchies in earlymodern England weregrafted onto African laborers , a process that facilitated the disempowerment of blacks alongside women in Virginia's patriarchal order. By the time slavery and gender were brought face to face in Georgia, in the middle of the eighteenth century, racial demarcation was well established across other colonies. But in post-1750 Georgia the guy lines were secured in the opposite order: here, the framework was slavery and the shifting code was that of gender. Slaverywas the door through which new definitions of womanhood entered colonial Georgia. As a host of scholars have noted, the codification of gender difference enhanced white male authority and, across the colonies, had established "a strict social hierarchy based on Anglo-American values by the time of the American Revolution."2 In addition to protecting, isolating, and circumscribing the economic activity of women in Georgia, legislators applied considerable effort to effectively controlling the slavepopulation. These slavecodes had a perceptible and often brutal impact on the lives of the growing number of bondspeople in the province and also, in different ways,introduced measuresthat deeply conditioned the behavior ofwhites. Most fundamentally,the regulation of interracial sex—both at law and by custom—established ground rules for the most intimate kind of interaction between men and women. Twocritical threads of the web met here. In the second half of 1749 the trustees, followingadvicefrom officials in Georgia , had produced the colony's first slave code.3 It prohibited interracial marriage and clearly articulated the consequences of transgression: "No Intermarriage between White People and Negroes shall be deemed lawful Marriages and if anyWhite Man shall be convicted of lying with a female Negroe, or any White Woman of lying with a Male Negroe He or She shall on such conviction forfeit Ten pounds Sterling or receive such Corporal Punishment as the Court shall think proper to inflict and the Negroeshall receiveCorporal Punishment."4 This measure, while deliberately written to alter social...

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