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

Brown's brilliant work on race, gender and power in colonial Virginia is far more than inclusive. In a comprehensive, thoughtful, enlightening work, Brown has made gender and race the central modes of analysis in an attempt to understand the societal, political, and legal institutions of colonial Virginia.
Drawing on every conceivable source on colonial Virginia, from tax rolls, deeds, county show more court records, government documents, narrative histories of the colony by its early occupants, court minutes, newspapers, statutes, and wills and inventories, and possessing a firm command of the secondary literature on virtually every aspect of colonial Virginia and Chesapeake history from the most traditional to the most current and pathbreaking, Brown has woven a marvelous synthesis of those sources that convincingly explains the way in which the social categories of race and gender were continually redefined by Virginians so that they might better support the patriarchy of elite Virginia society that existed by the Revolution. show less