The racial descriptions black and white did not yet exist.
The time was early Colonial America, and immigrants to the Virginia Colony were English or African. The terms "black" and "white" would not begin coming into usage until the late 1600s.
Those early English colonists were familiar with class differences and gender differences. They knew how a gentleman ought to behave. They knew how a laborer ought to behave. And a man and woman each had different jobs.
In her new book, "Good Wives, Nasty Wenches & Anxious Patriarchs," Assistant Professor of History Kathleen M. Brown wrote about how colonists created racial definitions to separate the roles of slaves from the roles of the English. Brown's is the first book to focus especially on English gender roles and on how the colonists used them to define their attitudes toward the African slaves. She chose Virginia as the place that exemplified the colonists' thinking.
"Virginia was the Colony where Amercian ideas about race started," Brown said.
Brown became interested in the subject in graduate school, when her Colonial history professor made little mention of women. Her curiosity piqued, she investigated and found an open field. People were studying the history of 20th century women, 19th century women, but not Colonial women.
What Brown found was a culture challenged by new circumstances. The familiar gender roles of women and of men were challenged by the environment to which they moved. And then new roles had to be defined for a new class of people -- slaves.
English women who moved to Colonial Virginia found that they had to get their hands dirty in ways no self-respecting woman in England would consider, Brown said. The tobacco economy there required some English women above servant class to work in the fields at times, whereas in England only "nasty wenches," the lowest of the servant class women, ever worked in the fields.
Because the facts of Colonial life didn't fit the English ideals, the embarrassed colonists preferred to paper over the reality, to pretend that women in the Colonies never did field work, Brown said. They worried that if word got around England, no self-respecting English woman would emigrate to the Colonies.
"It was an uncomfortable moment of culture trying to reconcile itself to life in the new world," Brown said.
Kathleen M. Brown
Slaves took pressure off the culture by taking over the roles that had made the English uncomfortable. That meant slave women would work in the fields, and English women could go back to being the proper "good wives" of the book title, tending house, family and sometimes animals.
"One of the questions I asked was about power, how did the colonists regard it," Brown said. "It was something men had over women. They experienced power in their daily life within their households and families."
But life at home for successful 18th century planters showed how precarious their power was.
"In their daily lives wives disobey, slaves and laborers run away, people who should be grateful steal, lie and don't vote for them," Brown said.
The picture of the colonists held by London gentlemen was of "rustics, people who have gone to the edge of civilization and become uncivilized with their contact with the wilderness," Brown said.
The colonists were aware of that image and even believed it. They felt like shadows of real gentlemen.
The "anxious patriarchs" of her book's title needed to prove their gentility to themselves and to society, so they treated their families with exaggerated refinement. And to shore up the crumbling facade of power, the Colonial gentlemen were no gentlemen toward their slaves. The colonists treated the slaves brutally not only to teach the slaves a lesson, but to let their English families and community know they were men to be reckoned with.
As for the "nasty wenches" of the title, when field labor became the lot of the African slave women -- a role they were assigned as the lowest women in the class structure -- the term "nasty wenches" also became their lot. Eventually, "wenches" ceased applying to any white women at all, Brown said.
The contrasting racial epithets white and black eventually became a verbal way to further distance the races.
Besides showing how language reinforced the class structure, Brown's book also traces how new laws helped the colonists differentiate the English from the Africans, the men from the women.
"The laws passed in Virginia influenced the laws passed in the other Colonies, particularly in the South," she said. "One of the first laws that expressed racial difference between African and English women was passed in 1643."
The law applied taxes to the field work of African women just as laws until then applied taxes to the field work of all men. The law did not extend the tax to English women's field work. Their work remained untaxed because field work was never acknowledged as an English woman's responsibility.
At the same time, laws changed what society considered sexually illicit. "By featured interracial elements."
By the 1750s white women, although still less powerful than the white men, had gained a certain respectability, because the stigma for lowly field work and sexual lewdness was displaced onto black women, a permanently enslaved class available to white men. And the definition of who was black and enslaved had expanded to include mixed race offspring.
"The definition of race changes to fit economic and political circumstances," Brown said. "It's amazing how little is biological; the rest is cultural."
But society tries to make the definition look like it's based on biology, not cultural expedience. "It's interesting to see how much work goes into creating the look of a 'natural' concept," Brown said.
Return to Compass Features for December 3, 1996