Women In Early America

Agency and Identity: Women in Early America
The historiography of gender in American is a rich and diverse field that has made its presence felt throughout the discipline of history. Gender historians have found bountiful ground in the shifting social and economic structures of eighteenth and Nineteenth century North America, as well as the surrounding regions. The multi-national and multi-ethnic nature of the region has led to a multitude of new investigations on the roles played by gender and identity within every strata of early American life. This paper will examine two such works and explore the contributions to the field made by both authors. We will begin with Kathleen Brown’s, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender,
Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Brown began her research by delving into a large archive of records, including newspapers, and court records, along with wills and inventories, in an attempt to look into every corner of eighteenth century Virginia for the purpose of understanding the experience of women, within the patriarchal system. Through this exhaustive survey Brown found that the lives of colonial women could not be examined through a single lens, and that the ideas of “race, class, and gender, are overlapping and related social categories, not as variables competing for analytical supremacy.” (Brown p. 4) The monograph then goes on to explain how each of these factors had a role in defining the role of women in colonial Virginia, not as bystanders regulated to a subservient role, but as full historical actors within what had been viewed as a closed system. Brown divides the book into three well defined and clearly written sections.
She first sets the stage by explaining the implications that the cross cultural transfer of traditional gender identities had on both English and Native American ideas of gender roles. In the face of new conceptions of gender, the colonists further refined their gender identities by creating more nuanced categories of femininity. The author continues in part two by adding the social construction of race into the narrative. The addition of Africans and slavery into the already complicated mix of early Virginia forced yet another redefinition of gender identity. The introduction of race allowed white males to refine their patriarchal position through more formal means, defining gender through tax law and aligning slavery with race and status. Consequently, changes in the laws concerning race and gender became the “mainspring of social control” (Brown p. 219) in
Virginia. With all of the players present, Brown moves on to examine the back and forth struggle between patriarchal men and the other inhabitants of Virginia. Any attempt to maintain traditional English gender identities was met with resistance from slaves, children and especially wives. This resistance was often subtle, taking the form of manipulative gossip, child rearing strategies, and family planning. However, resistance also manifested in less subtle ways, such as outright rebellion and violence. As a result, Brown refuses to see patriarchy as a universal societal institution. Instead, she finds that in eighteenth century Virginia the system was defined by “a highly contested form of domestic authority.” (Brown p. 5) Brown sees this dichotomy, this give and take between masculine control and feminine resistance, at the heart of many of the transformations in social practices and societal mores within the American colonies. This combined with the author’s methodology in seeing the overlapping nature of race, class, and gender helped redefine gender studies and had wide ranging effects throughout the field.
The other monograph this paper will examine is Jenifer Morgan’s, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
Morgan diverges from Kathleen Brown in several respects. Instead of taking a broad view of women in early America, Brown narrows the focus and looks primarily at the experience of African slave women and the identity they developed in relationship to their sexuality and evolving racial ideology. Effectively, Laboring Women sets out to explore “the ways in which enslaved women lived their lives in the crux of slave owner’s vision of themselves as successful white men and thus shouldered the burden connected to but distinct from that borne by enslaved men.” (Morgan
p.1)
In her investigation, Morgan’s sources were similar to Kathleen Brown’s in that she used wills, inventories, and personal accounts. However, Morgan chose to spread her study over a wider geographical region in order to demonstrate the pervasive nature of racial ideology throughout the emerging Atlantic system. Morgan proceeds through a series of thematic chapters that show the progression of African women from West Africa to their eventual role in the Atlantic economy.
The first and second chapters of the book serve to define notions of identity, both from the viewpoint of the Africans, and through the eyes of the Europeans. Morgan finds that European observations led to “ideas about black sexuality and misconceptions about black female sexual behavior formed the cornerstone of European and Euro-Americans general attitudes toward slavery.” (Morgan p. 7) The third and fourth chapters define the doubled labor inherent in the lives of these transplanted women.
This doubled labor stemmed not only from the agricultural work expected from the enslaved. It also included the slave owner’s dependence on slave reproduction and how it became the lynchpin of a slave labor dependent economic system that would eventually dominate the agricultural landscape for generations. This necessitated the appropriation of women’s reproductive rights and defined their position within society. Morgan suggests that “women’s reproductive identity – and by that I mean both the experience of childbirth and perhaps more important, the web expectations about childbirth held both by black women and men and those who enslaved them – itself provides the comparative frame rather the crop being cultivated.” (Morgan p.4)
This is a significant deviation from previous studies of agricultural slavery in the new world. This redefinition of terms centers the discussion not on what slaves did, but upon who they were. Under this new vision, the economic and personal importance of reproductive behavior demonstrates how enslaved women “existed at the center, not the margins of the colonial landscape.” While Morgan is careful to state that reproduction should not be the sole method of analysis used, the author goes on to state that the “experience of reproduction significantly influenced both the violence done to enslaved African women in the Americas and their ability to survive.” (Morgan p.196)
The final chapter deals with the increasingly complicated dialectic of resistance and compliance for women trapped within the system. The economic importance of enslaved women gave them a level of protection from some of the overt violence inherent in the system, but also subjected them to special burdens unique to their position as mothers and producers of labor. This reproductive identity is the central theme to this monograph. While the work is bound within the context of gender and race, it is primarily concerned with the created identity of these women.
Initially there seems to be little common ground between these two authors, as the worlds they portray diverge at several points. However, there are many instances of similarity, such as the complicated nature of resistance to a patriarchal system along with the fact that Morgan explains that “without understanding how the categories of race and gender inform each other, one is left with a one dimensional sense of how the categories were mobilized and why they resonated with such clarity.” (Morgan p. 197) This coincides with Kathleen Browns’ previously mentioned assertion that race, class, and gender are overlapping categories that must be examined together to see the complete picture. While the focus on slave women limits Morgan’s exploration of class, both works actually seem to be two sides of the same coin. Each monograph defines an aspect of women’s lives within the rapidly changing environment of early America, all within the context of race, class and gender.