Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia.(Book review)

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia, by Kathleen M. Brown. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. xvi, 496 pp. $19.95 paper.

KATHLEEN BROWN BEGINS HER SUGGESTIVE yet ultimately frustrating book Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs with a lament. Historians have answered questions about the origins of slavery in British North America, she argues, "without any sustained attention to the uses of gender in constituting racial categories and legitimating political authority" (p. 2). To understand both colonial Virginia and slavery's origins, she asserts, we must incorporate both a social history …