Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs PDF Author: Kathleen M. Brown
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807838292
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
Kathleen Brown examines the origins of racism and slavery in British North America from the perspective of gender. Both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, gender helped determine the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery in Virginia. But the rise of racial slavery also transformed gender relations, including ideals of masculinity. In response to the presence of Indians, the shortage of labor, and the insecurity of social rank, Virginia's colonial government tried to reinforce its authority by regulating the labor and sexuality of English servants and by making legal distinctions between English and African women. This practice, along with making slavery hereditary through the mother, contributed to the cultural shift whereby women of African descent assumed from lower-class English women both the burden of fieldwork and the stigma of moral corruption. Brown's analysis extends through Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, an important juncture in consolidating the colony's white male public culture, and into the eighteenth century. She demonstrates that, despite elite planters' dominance, wives, children, free people of color, and enslaved men and women continued to influence the meaning of race and class in colonial Virginia.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs PDF Author: Kathleen M. Brown
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807838292
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
Kathleen Brown examines the origins of racism and slavery in British North America from the perspective of gender. Both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, gender helped determine the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery in Virginia. But the rise of racial slavery also transformed gender relations, including ideals of masculinity. In response to the presence of Indians, the shortage of labor, and the insecurity of social rank, Virginia's colonial government tried to reinforce its authority by regulating the labor and sexuality of English servants and by making legal distinctions between English and African women. This practice, along with making slavery hereditary through the mother, contributed to the cultural shift whereby women of African descent assumed from lower-class English women both the burden of fieldwork and the stigma of moral corruption. Brown's analysis extends through Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, an important juncture in consolidating the colony's white male public culture, and into the eighteenth century. She demonstrates that, despite elite planters' dominance, wives, children, free people of color, and enslaved men and women continued to influence the meaning of race and class in colonial Virginia.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs PDF Author: Kathleen M. Brown
Publisher: Omohundro Ins
ISBN: 9780807846230
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs PDF Author: Kathleen M. Brown
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Foul Bodies

Foul Bodies PDF Author: Kathleen M. Brown
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300160275
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
In colonial times few Americans bathed regularly; by the mid-1800s, a cleanliness “revolution” had begun. Why this change, and what did it signify? A nation’s standards of private cleanliness reveal much about its ideals of civilization, fears of disease, and expectations for public life, says Kathleen Brown in this unusual cultural history. Starting with the shake-up of European practices that coincided with Atlantic expansion, she traces attitudes toward “dirt” through the mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating that cleanliness—and the lack of it—had moral, religious, and often sexual implications. Brown contends that care of the body is not simply a private matter but an expression of cultural ideals that reflect the fundamental values of a society.The book explores early America’s evolving perceptions of cleanliness, along the way analyzing the connections between changing public expectations for appearance and manners, and the backstage work of grooming, laundering, and housecleaning performed by women. Brown provides an intimate view of cleanliness practices and how such forces as urbanization, immigration, market conditions, and concerns about social mobility influenced them. Broad in historical scope and imaginative in its insights, this book expands the topic of cleanliness to encompass much larger issues, including religion, health, gender, class, and race relations.

Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville

Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville PDF Author: Mary Elizabeth Perry
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691219729
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
In this exploration of crisis in Counter-Reformation Spain, Mary Elizabeth Perry reveals the significance of gender for social order by portraying the lives of women who lived on the margins of respectability--prostitutes, healers, visionaries, and other deviants who provoked the concern of a growing central government linked closely to the church. Focusing on Seville, the commercial capital of Habsburg Spain, Perry uses rich archival sources to document the economic and spiritual activity of women, and efforts made by civil and church authorities to control this activity, during a period of local economic change and religious turmoil. In analyzing such sources as art and literature from the period, women's writings, Inquisition records, and laws and regulations, Perry finds that social definitions of what it meant to be a woman or a man persisted due to their sanctification by religious ideas and their adaptation into political order. She describes the tension between gender ideals and actual conditions in women's lives, and shows how some women subverted the gender order by using a surprisingly wide variety of intellectual and physical strategies.

Stray Wives

Stray Wives PDF Author: Mary Beth Sievens
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 081474009X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Whereas my husband, Enoch Darling, has at sundry times used me in so improper and cruel a manner, as to destroy my happiness and endanger my life, and whereas he has not provided for me as a husband ought, but expended his time and money unadvisedly, at taverns . . . . I hereby notify the public that I am obliged to leave him. Phebe Darling, January 13, 1796 Hundreds of provocative notices such as this one ran in New England newspapers between 1790 and 1830. These elopement notices--advertisements paid for by husbands and occasionally wives to announce their spouses' desertions as well as the personal details of their marital conflicts--testify to the difficulties that many couples experienced, and raise questions about the nature of the marital relationship in early national New England. Stray Wives examines marriage, family, gender, and the law through the lens of these elopement notices. In conjunction with legal treatises, court records, and prescriptive literature, Mary Beth Sievens highlights the often tenuous relationships among marriage law, marital ideals, and lived experience in the early Republic, an era of exceptional cultural and economic change. Elopement notices allowed couples to negotiate the meaning of these changes, through contests over issues such as gender roles, consumption, economic support, and property ownership. Sievens reveals the ambiguous, often contested nature of marital law, showing that husbands' superior status and wives' dependence were fluid and negotiable, subject to the differing interpretations of legal commentators, community members, and spouses themselves.

Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America

Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America PDF Author:
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807834874
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America

Women Before the Bar

Women Before the Bar PDF Author: Cornelia Hughes Dayton
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807838241
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Women before the Bar is the first study to investigate changing patterns of women's participation in early American courts across a broad range of legal actions--including proceedings related to debt, divorce, illicit sex, rape, and slander. Weaving the stories of individual women together with systematic analysis of gendered litigation patterns, Cornelia Dayton argues that women's relation to the courtroom scene in early New England shifted from one of integration in the mid-seventeenth century to one of marginality by the eve of the Revolution. Using the court records of New Haven, which originally had the most Puritan-dominated legal regime of all the colonies, Dayton argues that Puritanism's insistence on godly behavior and communal modes of disputing initially created unusual opportunities for women's voices to be heard within the legal system. But women's presence in the courts declined significantly over time as Puritan beliefs lost their status as the organizing principles of society, as legal practice began to adhere more closely to English patriarchal models, as the economy became commercialized, and as middle-class families developed an ethic of privacy. By demonstrating that the early eighteenth century was a crucial locus of change in law, economy, and gender ideology, Dayton's findings argue for a reconceptualization of women's status in colonial New England and for a new periodization of women's history.

Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic

Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic PDF Author: Matthew Mason
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876631
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Giving close consideration to previously neglected debates, Matthew Mason challenges the common contention that slavery held little political significance in America until the Missouri Crisis of 1819. Mason demonstrates that slavery and politics were enmeshed in the creation of the nation, and in fact there was never a time between the Revolution and the Civil War in which slavery went uncontested. The American Revolution set in motion the split between slave states and free states, but Mason explains that the divide took on greater importance in the early nineteenth century. He examines the partisan and geopolitical uses of slavery, the conflicts between free states and their slaveholding neighbors, and the political impact of African Americans across the country. Offering a full picture of the politics of slavery in the crucial years of the early republic, Mason demonstrates that partisans and patriots, slave and free--and not just abolitionists and advocates of slavery--should be considered important players in the politics of slavery in the United States.

Southern Sons

Southern Sons PDF Author: Lorri Glover
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801884986
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
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