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, …show more content…
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 …show more content…
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
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, …show more content…
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 …show more content…
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