Engendering Racial Difference By Kathleen M Brown Summary

“Engendering Racial Difference,” published in Kathleen M. Brown’s 1996 book Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia, provides the reader with an understanding of how the race-specific role of women came to exist during the mid-seventeenth century in colonial Virginia. Brown’s thesis is the early implications of racial difference and discriminatory measures taken against African women resulted in this race-specific role of women. In the early seventeenth century, the English viewed other races as inferior. Therefore, they tried to assert “desires for domination” over other races, including Africans. For example, the English taxed all Africans in the colonies, as by English standards, both