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

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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.

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Release dateDec 1, 2012
ISBN9780807838297
Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia
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Kathleen M. Brown

Kathleen M. Brown is associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.

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    Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs - Kathleen M. Brown

    GOOD WIVES, NASTY WENCHES, AND ANXIOUS PATRIARCHS

    Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs

    Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia

    Kathleen M. Brown

    Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London

    The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture is sponsored jointly by the College of William and Mary and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

    © 1996 The University of North Carolina Press

    All rights reserved

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Brown, Kathleen M., 1960-

    Good wives, nasty wenches, and anxious patriarchs: gender, race, and power in colonial Virginia / Kathleen M. Brown.

    p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 0-8078-2307-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

    ISBN 0-8078-4623-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

    1. Virginia—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775. 2. Sex role—Virginia—History.

    3. Women—Virginia—Social conditions. 4. Virginia—Race relations.

    5. Social classes—Virginia—History. I. Institute of Early American History and Culture (Williamsburg, Va.) II. Title.

    F229.B8783 1996 96-16502

    975.5'02—dc20 CIP

    This volume received indirect support from an unrestricted book publication grant awarded to the Institute by the L. J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation of Oakland, California.

    cloth 06 05 04 03 02 5 4 3 2 1

    paper 06 05 04 03 02 9 8 7 6 5

    To Sheila Mahoney Brown

    and to the memory of Catherine Cunningham Mahoney

    and John Edward Mahoney

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    Nearly ten years ago, I began incurring intellectual and financial debts in my quest to write a dissertation on the gender history of colonial Virginia. Funding from the Graduate School and the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin, the Martha L. Edwards Memorial Scholarship Trust Fund, a Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, the Lena Lake Forrest Fellowship of the Business and Professional Women’s Foundation, and the National Society of Colonial Dames all made it possible for me to leave the frozen climes of Wisconsin to conduct my research in Virginia and to return again to embark on the writing. That I was in Wisconsin at all I owe to Gerda Lerner, whose scholarship inspired me to enter graduate school and whose creation of a women’s history program provided me with an intellectual home and the training I needed to become a scholar myself. That I needed to leave Wisconsin for Virginia I owe to Charles L. Cohen, whose excellent seminar on early American history convinced me of the need for more research on gender in colonial America. A most generous and supportive third reader, William Van Deburg, read drafts of chapters with lightning speed and helped to make the process of dissertation writing more pleasant. In addition, I benefited from the written comments of Steve J. Stern, who also served on the committee.

    Since leaving Wisconsin, the debts have mounted. Three semesters of funding from the Institute of Early American History and Culture, including a year funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and one semester of leave from Princeton University enabled me to get back into the archives and revise the dissertation. I am grateful to Daniel T. Rodgers and Jean B. Lee for helping to arrange the schedule of teaching and leave during this three-year period. The opportunity to participate in the intellectual life of these two very different institutions was a tremendous aid to thinking about the book in different ways than I had thought about the dissertation.

    In addition to this financial, institutional, and intellectual assistance, I am very grateful to a host of helpful archivists and librarians at several different locations. Staffs at the Virginia Historical Society, the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division, and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library were generous and efficient. The Research Division of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, especially Linda Rowe and Kevin Kelly, gave me permission to use the transcripts of York County court records and shared their expertise. Special thanks go to the librarians at the Virginia State Library and Archives, who, under the adept leadership of Conley Edwards, made many a long day in front of the microfilm machines both productive and pleasant. I am also grateful to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin for making possible my use of interlibrary loan materials and to Michael Edmunds, who took a flexible rather than punitive approach to my borrowing privileges during the final semester of work on the dissertation.

    Many of the friends and colleagues whom I have imposed upon to read this manuscript are as relieved as I that it is finally completed. Among the most grateful, no doubt, are the people who read it in its entirety several times. Gerda Lerner and Charles Cohen gamely slogged through the revised manuscript and made excellent suggestions about how to improve it. Paul Clemens generously read portions of the manuscript more than once and was candid with me about its strengths and its weaknesses. Outside readers for the Institute of Early American History and Culture—Suzanne Lebsock, Philip Schwarz, and, later, Drew Gilpin Faust and Allan Kulikoff—were generous with their praise and judicious with their criticisms. Rutgers University colleagues Tom Slaughter and Philip Greven offered useful suggestions during the final stages of revision. Members of the Rutgers Gender History discussion group, especially Jan Lewis and Belinda Davis, helped me to make significant improvements to Chapter 9. I learned a great deal from John Selby’s reading of Chapter 5 and Kenneth Lockridge’s detailed comments on several chapters.

    Several people generously shared research, helped me with the management of my data, or facilitated my archival work by giving me a place to stay. Emory Evans, Michael L. Nicholls, and Kevin Kelly shared research notes and told me about additional sources that helped me to flesh out the factual base of portions of this manuscript. David Rawson extracted information from my transcripts of the court records about the prosecutions of fathers, and Anna Jarvis and Shawn Holl double-checked the cases listed in my databases against these same transcripts. Page Parrish Wright, a Virginian who was always tremendously hospitable to me, even when she secretly thought I was a poor Yankee child, took me into her home during the long months of research in Richmond. Julie Richter, whose expertise on colonial Virginia is evident in the work she has done for Colonial Williamsburg and her own careful scholarship on York County, deserves special recognition for her unceasing kindness and assistance. Not only did she provide me with a place to stay in Williamsburg during the early days of my research and share her own findings, but she subsequently read many chapter drafts and heard innumerable of my papers. During the final phase of revisions, she read the entire revised manuscript and saved me from several foolish errors.

    I am also grateful to the following people for combinations of moral support, friendship, generosity of time, rigorous criticisms, and intellectually stimulating conversation, which enabled me to see this project to completion: Steven Aron, Bob Buchanan, Sharon Block, Maureen Fitzgerald, Colin Gordon, Martha Hodes, Maria Hoehn, Roger Horowitz, Walter Johnson, Jennifer Jones, Susan Koerber, Marie Laberge, Liz Lunbeck, Earl Mulderink, Jeanie O’Brien-Kehoe, Anne Lewis Osler, Thomas Ryan, David Schuyler, Susan Selleck, Beverly Sensbach, Jon Sensbach, Jim Sidbury, Susan Smith, Darren Staloff, Chris Stansell, Doris Stormoen, Peter Thompson, Marsha Way, Tracey Weis, Michael Wilson, and Joel Wolfe. Nancy Hartog and Dirk Hartog have, in addition to opening their New Jersey home to me, kept me cheerful and sane during two years of simultaneous commuting and revising. Nancy Isenberg and Saul Cornell, both separately and in combination, have had an enormous intellectual impact upon me. Although this is not the book that either one of them would have written about colonial Virginia, it has been significantly influenced by their critiques of social history. Leslie Reagan and Leslie Schwalm have provided the most consistent supply of all types of assistance over the last eight years. Many of the ideas in this book took root in conversations I had with each of them. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Mary Keenan, a gifted teacher and scholar, whose enthusiasm for and mastery of her subject ignited my interest in history.

    Several chapters of the manuscript have benefited from the comments of panelists and audiences at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the Southern Historical Association conference, the Social Science Historians Association conference, the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies, and the Columbia Seminar on Early American History and Culture. The comments of Tommy Bogger, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Joan Gunderson, Mick Nicholls, and James Merrell were particularly helpful in making me rethink the organization and emphasis of my arguments.

    Portions of Chapter 2 appeared previously as The Anglo-Indian Gender Frontier, in Nancy Shoemaker, ed., Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women (New York, 1994), 26–48, and appear here with the permission of the publisher. Portions of Chapter 3 were previously published in ‘Changed … into the Fashion of Man’: The Politics of Sexual Difference in a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Settlement, Journal of the History of Sexuality, VI (1995), 171–193.

    I owe many thanks to the hardworking people at the Institute of Early American History and Culture for their efforts to make this book into a reality. Ronald Hoffman has been the soul of kindness during the five years I have known him. His words of wisdom have many times calmed my fears about the process of publishing a first book. Sally Mason enlivened the Institute with her irrepressible energy and boundless intelligence. My deepest gratitude is to my editor, Fredrika Teute, whose dogged work on several versions of the manuscript and incisive comments have made this a much better book than it would otherwise have been. I have also enjoyed working with copyeditor Virginia Montijo Chew, who pleasantly bore my incessant questions about commas and hyphens and kindly provided whatever help was needed to get the manuscript into shape. Although Gil Kelly did not get the chance to take the blue pencil to the gendered language of the manuscript, I still reaped the benefits of his quirky sense of humor and detailed comments on an earlier draft of Chapter 1. At the University of North Carolina Press, Kate Torrey and Lewis Bateman navigated the manuscript through the publishing process, for which I am very grateful.

    Everyone who writes a book thanks her family last when in fact they should be thanked first. I am lucky to have a very supportive large extended family, who have made kind inquiries about the book and politely wondered when it was going to be done. I am sure they will all be delighted to find a copy jammed into the toe of their Christmas stockings this year. My sister, Jeanne Brown Lewis, listened to me present papers and read a large portion of the manuscript in an earlier stage. She also coined the term planterism, which is, I think, as apt a description of planter culture in the American South as any historian has ever concocted. Michael Brown never failed to ask about my progress on the book and tried to remain connected to the project in whatever way he could. My mother, Sheila Brown, to whom, along with my grandparents, this book is dedicated, always respected my need to work on the book and offered an extraordinary amount of encouragement and support over the years.

    The only person who has read the book more often than I have is Ted Pearson. In addition to providing cogent criticism and proofreading, he has on many occasions listened to me wrestle with intellectual problems and shared insights from his own scholarship on South Carolina. He has, moreover, cheerfully taken on extra chores around the house so that we wouldn’t perish in a sea of unpaid bills, dust bunnies, and dirty dishes. Out of deference to his wishes that I not embarrass him with a goofy public declaration of affection, I say, simply, thank you.

    CONTENTS

    Acknowledgments

    Illustrations and Tables

    Abbreviations and Notes on the Text

    Introduction

    PART I. GENDER FRONTIERS

    1. Gender and English Identity on the Eve of Colonial Settlement

    2. The Anglo-Indian Gender Frontier

    3. Good Wives and Nasty Wenches:

    Gender and Social Order in a Colonial Settlement

    PART II. ENGENDERING RACIAL DIFFERENCE

    4. Engendering Racial Difference, 1640–1670

    5. Vile Rogues and Honorable Men:

    Nathaniel Bacon and the Dilemma of Colonial Masculinity

    6. From Foul Crimes to Spurious Issue:

    Sexual Regulation and the Social Construction of Race

    7. Born of a Free Woman:

    Gender and the Politics of Freedom

    PART III. CLASS AND POWER IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

    8. Marriage, Class Formation, and the Performance of Male Gentility

    9. Tea Table Discourses and Slanderous Tongues:

    The Domestic Choreography of Female Identities

    10. Anxious Patriarchs

    Afterword

    Notes

    Index

    ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES

    MAPS

    1. Colonial Virginia in the Middle of the Seventeenth Century 8

    2. The Powhatans and Their Neighbors in 1607 47

    FIGURES

    1. Pocahontas 44

    2. Indian Woman 60

    3. Captain John Smith 70

    4. Powhatan Addressing His People 71

    5. Bastardy Cases Attributed to White Servant Women by Decade, Norfolk, Lancaster, and York Counties 194

    6. Inventory of Edward Nicken Signed by Mary Nicken 228

    7. Westover Floor Plan, circa 1726 262

    8. Lucy Parke Byrd 320

    9. Virginian Luxuries372

    TABLES

    1. Successful Tax-Exemption Petitions, Norfolk, Lancaster, and York Counties 124

    2. Slander Cases, Norfolk, Lancaster, and York Counties 147

    3. Reported Runaway Servants and Slaves, 1643–1675, Norfolk, Lancaster, and York Counties 153

    4. Punishments for Bastardy by White Female Servants, Norfolk, Lancaster, and York Counties 190

    5. Interracial Bastardy Offenses by White Servant Women, 1660–1729, Norfolk, Lancaster, and York Counties 199

    ABBREVIATIONS AND NOTES ON THE TEXT

    AHR American Historical Review AL Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville CCRI Susie M. Ames, ed., County Court Records of Accomack-Northampton, Virginia, 1632–1640 (Washington, D.C., 1954) CCR2 Susie M. Ames, ed., County Court Records of Accomack-Northampton, Virginia, 1640–1645 (Charlottesville, Va., 1973) C.O. Colonial Office, Public Record Office, London CWF Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia CWJS Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580–1631), 3 vols. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986) CWMA College of William and Mary Archives, Swem Library, Williamsburg, Virginia DOW Deeds, Orders, Wills EJC H. R. Mcllwaine, ed., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, 1680–1775, 13 vols. (Richmond, Va., 1930) EWA John William Blake, ed., Europeans in West Africa, 1450–1560, 2 vols. (London, 1942) HTVB William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania, ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund (London, 1953) JAF Journal of African History JHB John Pendleton Kennedy and H. R. McIlwaine, eds., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1619–1776, 12 vols. (Richmond, Va., 1905–1915) JO Judgments, Orders LC Library of Congress MCGC H. R. Mcllwaine, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia, 2d ed. (Richmond, Va., 1979) NEV Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606–1625 (New York, 1907) OW Orders, Wills OWI Orders, Wills, Inventories P&P Past and Present RVC Susan Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1905–1935) SAL William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, 13 vols. (1823; facsimile reprint, Charlottesville, Va., 1969) TOP Peter Force, ed., Tracts and Other Papers, Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, 4 vols. (1836; reprint, Cambridge, Mass., 1947) TWJS Edward Arber and A. G. Bradley, eds., Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1910) VG Virginia Gazette VHS Virginia Historical Society, Richmond VMHB Virginia Magazine of History and Biography VSL Virginia State Library and Archives, Richmond WMQ William and Mary Quarterly

    Unless otherwise noted, all references to the York County court records come from the York County Project, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia; Norfolk County and Lancaster County references can be found in the Virginia State Library and Archives, Richmond.

    All years given in the text and notes are New Style, following the Gregorian calendar.

    INTRODUCTION

    This study investigates how gender and race became intertwined components of the social order in colonial Virginia. It focuses on two related issues: the role of gender in the creation of racial slavery and the intensification of patriarchal forms in gentry families, colonial culture, and the legal apparatus of the state. It not only examines the uses of gender for constructing racial categories and legitimating political authority but takes stock of the transformation in gender relations that accompanied the rise of slavery and political stability in Virginia. Discourses of gender, the division of labor by sex, and the regulation of white women’s sexuality were integral to the process of defining race and contributed significantly to the establishment of slavery in Virginia during the seventeenth century. Racial slavery, in turn, breathed new life into patriarchal social relations. By the mid-eighteenth century, the social categories of gender and race had become mutually implicated in supporting the claims of a wealthy slaveholding planter class to social and political authority.

    In the years before the English settlement of the Chesapeake, the meanings and political uses of gender in England were relatively distinct from those of race and arguably both more pervasive and more powerful. During the sixteenth century, most of the inhabitants of England would have agreed that the differences between men and women were integral to nature’s divinely sanctioned plan and a cornerstone of social order. Even when social commentators disagreed about the moral significance of these differences, they articulated a vision of an orderly society in which women deferred to male authority. Despite difficulties in expressing the distinctions between men and women and assigning unambiguous moral values to them, religious, political, and cultural authorities invoked this gender ideal as a powerful metaphor for other social relationships in which power’ was unevenly distributed. The moral implications of skin color, in contrast, remained abstract to most English people, who would have been unlikely to encounter Africans in their daily lives. Literary and dramatic representations of Africans, whom the English referred to as blackamoors, reminded audiences of the Christian symbolism of blackness, but rarely did skin color constitute the basis of claims to political authority in daily life. Rather, such representations of race emphasized the limits of human agency in a world where nature’s order, symbolized by the enduring complexion of the blackamoor, remained inviolate.¹

    One hundred fifty years later and an ocean away, gender remained an important social category, but its political uses had been equaled, perhaps even supplanted, by race. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century contrasts between good women, exemplified by the English ideal of the good wife, and unsupervised wantons, known to promoters of the Virginia colony as nasty wenches, had gradually given way to a racial opposition in which women of English descent embodied the privileges and virtues of womanhood while women of African descent shouldered the burden of its inherent evil, sexual lust. In colonies such as Virginia that depended upon African slavery, such transformations in the moral applications of gender to daily life figured centrally in the creation of exploitable categories of racial difference. Beliefs in divinely sanctioned differences between men and women also proved adaptable to planters’ efforts to represent African slavery as part of nature’s plan.²

    There are many reasons for choosing to focus such a study on Virginia. The first British possession on the North American continent to import African slaves and to produce a colonial assembly, Virginia was also the first royal colony, later earning it the rather suggestive nickname Old Dominion. By the time of the Revolution, Virginia was the wealthiest colony in British North America and the one with the most slaves. From its inception, Virginia was also a settlement in which gender issues were close to the surface of political rhetoric. Named for the Virgin Queen, Virginia reflected the desires of Elizabeth’s adventurers to seize a new overseas territory. During the first five decades of settlement, the colony bore the dubious distinction of having the most lopsided sex ratio on the British North American mainland, a defect promoters tried to rectify with appeals to English women to migrate. Despite its demography, pamphleteers like John Hammond continued to personify the colony as female, comparing Virginia and Maryland to Leah and Rachel, the Fruitful Sisters of biblical fame.³

    My own interest in Virginia, however, grew not only from these defining features of the colony but from my concern that debates about the origins of slavery in British North America, most of which have focused on Virginia, had been laid to rest without any sustained attention to the uses of gender in constituting racial categories and legitimating political authority. Although several scholars have recently begun to define race as a socially constructed entity whose historical meaning is produced through an ongoing evaluation of difference, no one has connected this process to the history of gender relations in colonial America.⁴ Few historians, moreover, have systematically examined the ways in which class derived meaning from and was expressed through gender divisions of labor, clothing, and patterns of sociability in early America. In Virginia, legal sexual access to English women was an important component of free adult male status; by the end of the seventeenth century, however, it had also become a defining feature of white masculinity. Exploring this particular set of historical problems presents an opportunity to examine gender’s role in the expression, transmission, and replication of power in colonial America and its history of intimate connection to systems of racial dominance.

    A major goal of this study is to complicate our understanding of both the initial setback in patriarchal social relations in the Chesapeake, first described by Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, and the subsequent rise of planter authority by the early eighteenth century.⁵ Despite obvious limits to the power individual men could wield over individual women, or, for that matter, over each other, patriarchal forms of power demonstrated great flexibility, adaptability, and political utility, remaining integral to colonial society during its first 150 years. Although colonial settlement did indeed generate new social practices, in some cases creating opportunities for white women to expand the limits of their personal influence and liberties, patriarchy as political theory and as an ideal for social relations was not explicitly challenged in Virginia until Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. Even then, the short-lived revolt of would-be patriarchs against their leaders was largely conservative and ultimately led to a strong reassertion of patriarchal interests. Virginia’s great planters subsequently reached the peak of their power as a class during the eighteenth century, an achievement owing in large part to slavery, even as they continued to suffer challenges to their personal authority from slaves, wives, children, and other white propertyowners.

    To gain a more complex understanding of the workings of patriarchal power in Virginia, I have examined gender practices across cultural boundaries and treated men as well as women as gendered historical subjects. With a few notable exceptions, most of the literature about women in British North America has focused on Anglo-colonials. Although several scholars have recognized the importance of examining gender roles in a comparative cultural framework, the paucity of the sources on women—Indian, African, and English—has made such a task seem daunting.⁶ I have tried to surmount this difficulty by writing not just a social history of women in Virginia, although this has indeed been one of my goals, but a history of gender, broadly construed to include masculinity. The historical and cultural variations in masculinity are crucial to understanding the changing contours of family life and political culture during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The history of masculinity also offers suggestive evidence about changes in women’s lives that otherwise cannot be gleaned from the extant sources, thus making it easier to study gender across ethnic and racial lines.

    This study opens in Elizabethan England during a period of intense debate about women’s essential nature and of literary production about Gaelic Irish and African others. It follows English explorers across the Atlantic to the North American mainland, chronicling confrontations with the Powhatan Indians and the difficulties of early settlements.

    In Part II, I examine the early efforts of English settlers to define racial difference legally and in daily practice. One of the pivotal events in this defining process was the armed rebellion against the colonial governor led by Nathaniel Bacon. The political culture that emerged from the settlement of this conflict publicly celebrated and affirmed white masculinity, pushing enslaved Africans, particularly men, and Anglo-Virginian women to the margins of courtrooms, taverns, and cockfights. Relegated to the periphery of the colony’s white male public sphere, excluded peoples nonetheless found creative ways to etch their identities in the public record.

    This study concludes with an examination of gentry culture in the early to mid-eighteenth century, before the challenges of Baptists, London tobacco factors, and imperial administrators provoked the colony’s leading planters to defend their position in colonial society. Believing that these political tremors led to renegotiations of social relations in the colony, I have tried, whenever possible, to base my discussion upon sources written before 1750. To understand gentry culture between 1690 and 1750 on its own terms, it is necessary to keep the lens focused on the first half of the century.

    From the beginning of this project, I have conceptualized race, class, and gender as overlapping and related social categories, not as variables competing for analytical supremacy. By gender, I mean the historically specific discourses, social roles, and identities defining sexual difference and frequently deployed for the purposes of social and political order. Race is similarly constituted by the social meanings attached to physical appearance—itself a highly mediated phenomenon contingent upon culture—and used in the service of economic and imperial goals. Class includes the power deriving from material inequities, the systemic maintenance of those inequities by dominant social groups, and the symbols of that power commonly recognized by a society.

    I have assumed that there exists no pure embodiment of these three analytic categories but that each is part of the identities and interactions of all men and women, whether one labels them English, African, or Indian. They are, in other words, categories produced by relationships rather than things in themselves. Thus, I have not devoted any single chapter solely to race or to class or to gender, nor have I simply added gender to the existing literature on race and class in colonial Virginia. Rather, I treat gender, slavery, and elite dominance as interrelated relationships of power whose histories intersect and mutually shape one another.

    Patriarchy is also a crucial concept in this study. In its domestic form, I define it as the historically specific authority of the father over his household, rooted in his control over labor and property, his sexual access to his wife and dependent female laborers, his control over other men’s sexual access to the women of his household, and his right to punish family members and laborers. The patriarch’s power as husband, father, master, and head of household in colonial Virginia derived much of its strength from his attempts to inscribe meaning—sexual, economic, medical, and punitive—on the bodies of the women, children, and bound men in his household.⁸ Even at its zenith during the first half of the eighteenth century, however, patriarchy remained a highly contested form of domestic authority. Virginia’s wealthiest patriarchs were always conscious, moreover, that they, too, were bound to submit to higher authorities: imperial administrators, the crown, and God.

    The study of discourse and its relationship to social practice and power provide a useful entry into understanding these issues in colonial Virginia. I define discourse as the use of language delineating a community and its interests. A discourse arises in a specific historical and material context but subsequently acquires a myriad of other meanings and uses as material or political circumstances change, or as it is appropriated by different groups of people. From this perspective, what Edmund S. Morgan described as colonial Virginia’s ordeal might be understood as a shift in paradigm or episteme in which a group of people’s way of understanding the world is radically altered. During such moments of transformation in historical consciousness, the language with which historical subjects interpret their altered social reality is often profoundly reconfigured. I have attempted to chart this transformation in Virginia by tracking the changing ways residents described manhood, womanhood, and ethnic and racial difference. The historical shifts in their language did not simply reflect changing social practices, however; by providing the medium through which people defined and communicated acceptable boundaries for behavior, and indeed, perceived that behavior, languages of race and gender had a role in constituting practice. New uses of language not only offer important evidence about the timing of major historical changes but also reveal who in society has the power to define. In Virginia, discourses of gender and race became integral to the planter class’s practice of power as well as to its ability to communicate its own authority.

    The central premise of this study is that the various, and occasionally competing, discourses of gender generated in several different arenas—medical science, law, literature, and community—were more pervasive, systematically articulated, and politically useful than those of race on the eve of English voyages to Ireland, Africa, and the Americas. Despite contradictions and ambiguity in medical and religious theories, gender remained a powerful way to refer to nature and thus to rescue certain questions from debate by placing them in the realm of forces beyond the control of human beings. Gender discourses could, therefore, be mobilized to suggest that relationships between different groups of people—African and English, for example—were simply following a hierarchical pattern established by divine plan. Naturalized concepts of gender and race disguised both the fact and the sites of the cultural production of slavery, thereby protecting the interests represented by those productions.¹⁰

    Fashioned in multiple, often overlapping arenas, the meanings of gender and race infiltrated English settlers’ articulations of colonial identity. Borrowing heavily from these two languages of power during the last quarter of the seventeenth century, colonists tried to explain their relationship to London, to Indians, and to newly arrived English immigrants by calling themselves Virginians. This identity, distinct from that of the English they once were or the Indians who already inhabited the land, carried with it claims to specific kinds of privileges and power. Anglo-Virginians at the end of the seventeenth century, for example, claimed both the rights of Englishmen and the right to make decisions about issues concerning Indians and slaves that they alleged the English knew nothing about. But being a self-proclaimed colonial also carried with it the burden of English aspersions about life in Virginia, including crudeness and a lack of civility resulting from the attenuation of ties to London. Anglo-Virginian men internalized parts of this derogatory colonial portrait of themselves, accepting a feminized posture of subordination when necessary and investing large portions of their fortunes in the effort to mimic English gentility. At other times, however, they rejected this colonial persona in bold assertions of a potent colonial virility that drew strength from its appropriations of Indian masculinity.¹¹

    Weaving a narrative about the changing meanings of race and identity complicates the use of ethnic and racial labels. The history of early Virginia was not initially one of black people and white people but of Indian, African, and English peoples who had yet to define the meaning of black and white. To make matters more complicated, many of these people, Indian, African, and English, would not have defined themselves according to nations or continents of origin but probably thought in the local terms of family, kin group, village, and region. In the hands of English lawmakers in Virginia, however, continents and nations eventually transcended these local affiliations. Despite the inherent problems with this nomenclature, I use African to describe individuals imported to Virginia who I believe came directly from Africa. Afro-Virginian refers to creoles of African descent whom I know or suspect to have been born in the colony and includes those with European ancestors. I describe people as English when I know they are from England and as Anglo-Virginians when they are creoles. Indian designates peoples resident in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans and Africans as well as the descendants of those indigenous populations. I have avoided terms like black and white until they are historically salient, which is to say, when individuals are categorized legally by a subjective assessment of their appearance rather than by their place of birth. In the context of this study, even such flawed labels have some utility; they allow the reader to compare an individual’s life history—most notably her or his place of birth and journey to Virginia—with contemporaries’ constructions of racial or ethnic identity.

    The research for this study is drawn primarily from the Tidewater counties of Norfolk, Lancaster, and York, the areas first settled during the seventeenth century (see Map 1). Using county court records as quantifiable data, I have identified several shifts in crimes with an explicit gender content, such as fornication, bastardy, and slander. The pattern of prosecutions suggests the growing concern of colonial authorities to regulate certain kinds of sexual behavior as well as changes in behavior itself. Wills and deeds have allowed me to flesh out information about particular families and individuals. I have not, however, attempted massive family reconstitutions or quantitative analyses of shifts in wills and deeds over time. I have relied instead upon the fine work of Lois Green Carr, Lorena S. Walsh, Paul G. E. Clemens, Russell R. Menard, Jean B. Lee, Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, Allan Kulikoff, and James Horn, whose analyses of counties much like the ones in my study have permitted me to make more confident generalizations about population, household economies, slave ownership, bequest patterns, and mortality.¹²

    Although quantitative analyses have produced important data on life in the Chesapeake, such studies occasionally rely on an insufficiently historical model of human motivation and attribute perhaps too much historical causality to numbers rather than to culture. Even in small numbers, I argue here, English women, Indians, enslaved Africans, and free people of color could have had an important impact on the changing definitions of English identity as well as on race and gender relations themselves. I have, therefore, also used these court records as sources similar to the planters’ papers, promotional tracts, and travelers’ accounts that constitute the balance of my evidence. Court records often provide unique glimpses of life and work in the colony at a time when very little is known about people’s daily routines and even less about their conceptions of racial and sexual difference. Petitions to the governor and General Court, Colonial Office records, and archaeological site reports, although less consistent than the court records, have proved similarly invaluable in recovering something of the human face of life in the colony.

    My ultimate concern in this work is to plot the role of gender in the regulation of laborers, the politics of community life, the legitimation of political authority, the creation of meanings for racial difference, and the changing formation of English identity. From the moment English men and women stepped on foreign shores, fundamental beliefs in the naturalness of English gender roles played a crucial part in the unfolding drama of encounter and settlement. Yet, as my research suggests, gender was a slender reed upon which to pin so much. The challenges presented by indigenous peoples, the

    Map 1. Colonial Virginia in the Middle of the Seventeenth Century

    tobacco economy, and African slavery ultimately transformed the meanings of English womanhood and manhood, which were themselves already contested categories. Originally used to differentiate between married women of England’s middling order and poor English women suspected of sexual misdemeanors, good wives and nasty wenches assumed new meanings during the course of the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century, many Anglo-Virginian women, especially those of the planter class, aspired to the prerogative of plantation mistresses rather than the responsibilities of good wives. Referring almost exclusively to enslaved women of African descent, wenches, meanwhile, had been irrevocably racialized, reflecting the appropriation and transformation of English gender discourses in the creation of Virginia’s slave society.

    PART ONE

    Gender Frontiers

    CHAPTER ONE

    Gender and English Identity on the Eve of Colonial Settlement

    If this [women in masculine attire] be not barbarous, make the rude Scythian, the untamed Moor, the naked Indian, or the wild Irish, Lords and Rulers of well-governed Cities.—Hic Mulier, 1620

    The English settlers who crossed the Atlantic to Virginia in 1607 hailed from a society committed to patriarchal social relations but unsure of the nature of sexual difference. England’s initial voyages to the Chesapeake as well as its earlier forays to Ireland and West Africa occurred in a period of social and economic turmoil, marked by energetic discussions of gender relations and heightened community concern for the order of households. With the accession of Elizabeth I, English writers revived an ancient debate about woman’s essential nature and predisposition toward good or evil. Beliefs that female subordination was part of a natural order and a prerequisite for female virtue ran headlong into others in which women, like nature herself, were powerful, hence dangerous, because of their ability to elude precise definition by human beings. The dialogue intensified periodically as the political stakes changed, peaking during the religious conflicts and economic difficulties at the end of the century and again during James I’s subsequent efforts to revive patriarchal absolutism.

    The debates about gender were of political as well as social significance. The alleged physical and moral weakness of women provided authors with a useful metaphor for explaining other relations of dominance and submission. Marital, familial, and communal order all hinged on God’s sanction of male superiority; so, too, did concepts of political authority and the strength of a nation newly embarked on mercantile and imperial ventures overseas. As economic depression and social upheaval wracked England at the end of the sixteenth century, parliamentary legislation and local officials exploited traditions of gender difference in the interest of restoring order. Fundamental contradictions in contemporary definitions of sexual difference, however, placed a heavy burden on legal and religious institutions to explain and maintain distinctions between men and women. Carefully scrutinized by court and church alike, gender became an important technology of state power—both at home and abroad—and was basic to the very assertion of political authority.¹

    Women’s natural and proper subordination to men was not simply a subject for elite pamphlet debates. It also touched ordinary English people’s lives locally through the law, the church, and the culture of village life. The rising incidence of slander cases, the division of labor, and the persecution of witches all testified to the salience of a gendered social order for ordinary women and men. As demographic pressures and economic difficulties increased the size of the poor and vagrant populations, English propertyowners actively pursued beliefs that the subordination of women, especially the impoverished, would contain chaos and restore social harmony. Like the authors, lawmakers, and clerics of the period, these propertied individuals attempted to enforce the natural order, expanding the reach of state authority into the lives of poor people. Villagers, meanwhile, often had their own customs for punishing unruly women and shaming couples who deviated from ideals for household harmony. Although they appear to have shared in elite ideals for wifely submission, their intervention into disorderly households was inspired, not by philosophy or political theory, but by longstanding traditions of community self-regulation.

    England was not alone in the coincidence of rising imperial enthusiasms and conflict over the true nature of women. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Spain, the Netherlands, France, Portugal, and the Italian principalities were all similarly engaged in state-building projects that strengthened royal authority, making national honor and bulging state coffers contingent upon successful overseas trade.² Each aspiring nation also witnessed the rise of spirited printed debates about women’s nature—querelles des femmes—in which writers discussed differences between men and women and, more obliquely, questions of nature, power, and national identity. The essence of sexual difference thus became a pressing question throughout Europe at the same moment that questions about what it meant to be European—and, more specifically, English, Dutch, or Spanish—came to the fore.

    England’s first American colony, Virginia, was steeped in these debates from the moment of its inception. Its name evoked the sexual virtue Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, was believed to embody. Associations of the land with virgin innocence reinforced the notion that Virginia had been saved from the Spaniard’s lust to be conquered by the chaste English. Symbolizing unfulfilled male desire, female virtue, and the promise of a land not yet possessed, Virginia signified the ease with which English gender discourses could be adapted to the purpose of claiming a New World territory.³

    Significantly, Virginia was claimed by England and settled by English men and women at the same historical moment in which the English state, merchants, and adventurers had intensified their commitment to patriarchal households and female domesticity as the defining characteristics of Englishness. The discourses of gender that infused English discussions of social order and political authority gradually infiltrated the language of colonialism, permeating English efforts to distinguish themselves from such non-English peoples as the Gaelic Irish and West Africans. When English explorers eventually reached the shores of the North American continent, their concepts of political authority, their representations of native inhabitants, and their depictions of themselves as civilized conquerors reflected a history of imperial activity in which the language and performance of gender differences had played a prominent part.

    Gender and Political Authority

    For most of the sixteenth century, English writers described all of God’s creation as existing in an Aristotelian chain of being in which every creature was linked to others immediately above and below it. Each creature also belonged to larger groups consisting of elements, plants, animals, humans, or angels. Like the flora and fauna below them and the celestial beings above them, humans assumed places defined by relations to social superiors and inferiors. Women, however, had no direct relationship to other individuals in the chain but rather existed in subordinate positions to men of their rank.

    Relying on ancient texts, sixteenth-century writers drew analogies from this universal female subordination to establish and explain the naturalness of the political order. As the head of a household, a man constituted one of many concentric political circles that extended from the humblest cottage to the king’s palace. Most commonly, writers compared this patriarchal authority within families to religious or state power. The Christian humanist Desiderius Erasmus, for example, explicitly compared the kingdom to a great family and likened the king to a father. The archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, similarly compared wifely obedience to a husband with a subject’s obedience to a magistrate. Orderly households were, in these discussions, the fundamental building blocks of a divinely sanctioned social order, providing political and social stability through their model of patriarchal authority.

    During the tumultuous years between 1560 and 1640, writers relied increasingly upon the metaphor of the well-run household to communicate their vision for social order. By the early seventeenth century, defenders of monarchical authority articulated political obligation in openly patriarchal terms derived from models of household authority. Prominent advice book author Richard Brathwait called the family a domestic kingdom, a monarchy over which the father ruled. Sir Robert Filmer, author of Patriarcha (1642) and kin to many of Virginia’s gentry, similarly explained that as the Father over one family, so the king, as Father over many families, extends his care to preserve, feed, clothe, instruct and defend the whole commonwealth. Infusing these commonplace analogies with an explicit political content, seventeenth-century political and religious writers exploited the apparent naturalness of the father’s authority to defend royal absolutism.

    The need to maintain patriarchal households and orderly communities became both an obligation of and justification for state power. By criminalizing witchcraft and certain sexual acts that had previously been punished by communities, the state intervened in local definitions of social order to bolster its own authority. Henrician statutes declaring sodomy and bestiality capital offenses, for example, criminalized nonheterosexual behavior. Parliament’s decision to criminalize witchcraft in 1542, moreover, tightened the connections between gender ideologies and state power by reiterating categories of deviance and encouraging community efforts to enforce conformity.

    The positive reevaluation of marriage by Protestants and Counter Reformation Catholics during the late sixteenth century also reinvigorated patriarchal analogies to political authority. English Protestants rejected celibacy, allowing clergymen to form legal unions. Catholics at the Council of Trent (1563), meanwhile, instructed adherents to embrace marriage as a sacrament rather than as a last-ditch attempt to avoid the sin of fornication. When Tudor monarchs confiscated monastic properties that had formerly provided a celibate alternative for some English women and men, England joined the rest of Europe in making marriage a more likely and worthy destiny. Both Catholic and Protestant churches attempted to make good on the new importance of marriage by claiming exclusive rights to act as conjugal gatekeepers, declaring when the unmarried might be considered legally wed.

    Although Protestant reevaluations of marriage stressed ideals of spiritual equality between husband and wife, the spiritual power of each man over his own household may actually have been enhanced. The clergy’s modest success in convincing couples to adopt church marriage rituals increased opportunities for ministers to instruct brides in the divine decree of wifely obedience to husbands. Depictions of good women, described as hardworking, pious, quiet, and submissive wives, accompanied discussions of the reconfigured conjugal relationship. Some women undoubtedly benefited from the growing emphasis on individual relationships with God and direct contact with the Word through reading the vernacular Bible. But the diminished role of priests and the patriarchal emphasis of Protestant familial religion may have made female subordination to husbands more strictly normative, infusing female deviance and insubordination with a potentially more significant religious meaning.

    While lawmakers and clergymen redefined sexuality, marriage, and female conduct at home, Tudor monarchs contemplated ambitious colonial projects abroad. Attempts to achieve dominance in Ireland culminated in 1541 with the Henrician declaration of sovereignty over the island. No longer content with the powers of feudal lordship, Henry attempted to incorporate Ireland into his realm by declaring himself its king. England’s subsequent attempts to enforce this theoretical political dominance with military might only increased the need for an absolute state.¹⁰

    The English state ultimately gained strength from the conjunction of domestic interventions and imperial projects. Discourses about female subordination, which explained and justified the expansion of royal authority at home, also proved highly useful abroad, allowing the English to depict indigenous peoples, whose lands they wished to claim, as conquerable others. The key to the versatility of such a discourse lay in its ability to naturalize power. Described with gendered language, acts of dispossession and imperial appropriation became comprehensible as part of the natural order.

    Nature’s Power

    Even without overt challenges to the naturalness of women’s subordination to men, the theoretical connections between the chain of being, patriarchal power, and social order were fragile because of the difficulty of defining woman. Many Renaissance thinkers agreed that woman’s nature was highly changeable, dangerous, and unstable. Writing in the early seventeenth century, Joseph Swetnam, for example, expressed Renaissance traditions about female changeability when he complained that women have more contrary sorts of behaviour then there be women. It was impossible for a man to know all, no nor one part of women’s quallities, he concluded. Such characterizations of women derived from classical literature, Galenic concepts of sexual difference, Biblical creation accounts, and contemporary interpretations of women’s intertwined economic and reproductive roles.¹¹

    At the root of discussions of female nature and marriage lay profound ambivalence about the meaning of nature itself. Sixteenth-century English writers used the term in dozens of ways, ranging from the pejorative to the adulatory. In the great majority of its meanings, a female-personified nature signified a power, purpose, or force beyond human control, as in this popular proverb about the folly of trying to wash the blackamoor white:

    Leave off with paine, the blackamoor to skowre,

    With washinge ofte, and wipinge more then due:

    For thou shalt finde, that Nature is of powre,

    Do what thou canste, to keepe his former hue:

    Thoughe with a forke, wee Nature thruste awaie,

    Shee turnes againe, if wee withdrawe our hande:

    And thoughe, wee ofte to conquer her assaie,

    Yet all in vaine, shee turnes if still wee stande:

    Then evermore, in what thou doest assaie,

    Let reason rule, and doe the thinges thou maie.

    Such inexplicable and uncontrollable forces as time, weather, and creation were considered akin to God’s own powers and necessary for cosmic order.¹²

    Nature could also refer to the primitive—that which had not been altered by Christianity or culture—in both a positive and negative sense. In the former usage, it connoted a prelapsarian naked innocence, an earthly paradise from which man had been expelled. But primitive nature could also mean unenlightened heathenism, with nudity and long hair symbolizing bestiality and lust. During the sixteenth century, images of the primitive drew upon both of these meanings, with representations of forest-dwelling wild men or Diana, classical goddess of the hunt, signifying the dualism of unfallen nature as both threatening to and less corrupted than civilized society.¹³

    When writers argued that social hierarchies were part of the divinely created natural order, they invoked nature to explain the dominance of one group by another. Such interpretations echoed Aristotelian arguments that some groups of people had been specially created to fulfill subordinate social roles, a position that saw some revival in sixteenth-century Spanish debates about whether American Indians were natural slaves or natural children. Simultaneously omnipotent and primitive, nature became a powerful justification for European conquest in the Americas.¹⁴

    Human accomplishments could also be construed as natural when they brought allegedly bestial elements of creation into harmony with God’s plan for cosmic order. Women, wild men, gypsies, non-European peoples, children, the vagrant poor, and animals appeared in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century English texts and accounts of festivals as creatures in need of taming. The transformation of wild forests and swamps into parks, farms, and gardens also reflected this vision of nature, appropriately subdued.¹⁵

    Male dominion over women was but one of many relationships explained and legitimated through references to a divinely sanctioned nature. Most sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century pamphlets written about women reminded readers that Eve’s punishment for listening to the serpent had resulted in female suffering during childbirth, the reproductive function for which women were created. Women who denied their own weakness and imperfection and encroached on male privileges were often described as foolishly trying to thrust away nature. Playwrights and wits of the period often compared the necessity of women’s subordination to the relationship between horse and rider. One early-seventeenth-century pamphlet reminded readers of the similarities between controlling a woman and taming a horse: As a sharp bit curbs a froward horse, even so a cursed woman must be roughly used. Jokes of the period also employed this equestrian metaphor to refer to sexual intercourse.¹⁶

    Like the wild men of English folktales and court entertainments, women were represented as having an intimate and powerful connection to natural phenomena. Writers symbolized the alleged changeability of female nature with the moon, whereas the moist and cool tendencies of female humors inspired comparisons to water. Drawing upon Galenic concepts of sexual difference, many pamphleteers described women as lustier than men and given to sensuality as a result of poorly developed reason and imperfect physical constitutions. In most of these discussions, manhood, reason, Christianity, and civilization stood in opposition to women, sensuality, heathenism, and nature.¹⁷

    By the late sixteenth century, as the English contemplated the creation of mercantile outposts overseas, nature signified less the threat of wildness than an opportunity for elite male self-definition and validation. Elite men commonly depicted themselves as being well suited to the divinely appointed task of taming nature as a consequence of their superior reason. The tangible signs of their success—gardens, land under cultivation, and, most important, cities—testified to their identity as English men living during a golden age of English achievement.¹⁸

    Nature’s ability to encompass many different meanings made it useful for justifying English imperial and mercantile ambitions in Ireland, West Africa, and the Americas; but this same multivalent quality undermined its usefulness as a foundation for English identity. Uncertainties about what it meant to be English multiplied, especially when indigenous peoples rejected visions of a natural order in which English adventurers dominated grateful heathens. It is perhaps not surprising that, with growing poverty and social unrest at home and a female monarch ruling the realm, male pamphleteers sought to rescue the natural social order by defining the essential nature of woman.

    Ruling Women

    The English pamphlet debate about women made available a highly charged vocabulary of gender differences that had implications for the meaning of nature, power, and English society more generally. Following its initial appearance during the 1540s, the debate blossomed into a heated war of words between 1558 and 1570, as Elizabeth’s Protestant defenders attempted to shield her from misogynist attacks like those made on the previous queen, her Catholic half-sister Mary. The debate erupted intermittently thereafter, resurfacing during the 1580s and again between 1615 and 1640.¹⁹

    Most pamphlet writers did not dispute the existence of a distinct female essence but argued for a particular interpretation of it. Writers summoned evidence from such irreproachable sources as the Bible, classical literature, and nature itself. Sir Thomas Elyot’s Defence of Good Women (1545), for example, a dialogue that argued both women’s ability to rule and the appropriateness of female subordination to husbands, interpreted men’s and women’s physical differences as complementary and divinely sanctioned. Elyot represented women as weak and slippery like softe and clammy clay. Although the hard and consolidate stone of which men were constituted made for stronger walls, according to Elyot, both clay and stone had their own special use and perfection.²⁰

    Most other sixteenth-century authors would have agreed with Elyot’s portrait, although they were sharply divided about how to interpret female attributes. Whereas some listed shrewishness, insatiable lustiness, irrationality, and fickleness as natural female character traits, other writers, such as Cornelius Agrippa, insisted that modesty, a desire to nurture, and piety more accurately described most women. Agrippa also contended that women’s inferiority could be explained as a consequence of custome, education, fortune, and a certayne tyrannicall occasion, rather than of divine or natural law. Both misogynists and defenders of women concurred on the qualities defining a good woman but disagreed about whether most women had those qualities.²¹

    With Edward VI’s death in 1553 and the succession of his sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, pamphleteers expounded on questions of female character and nature in more explicitly political terms. The most extreme attack on female rulers as unnatural monsters came from Calvinist John Knox, who wrote The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558) with Catholic Mary Tudor in mind. Nature, declared Knox, doth paint them to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish, and experience hath declared them to be inconstant, variable, cruel, and lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment. When Elizabeth assumed power in 1558, Protestant adherents rushed to diffuse the potential damage of Knox’s misogynist attacks. John Aylmer, author of Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes agaynst theLate Blowne Blast (1559), defended Elizabeth’s right to rule by casting doubt upon the soundness of natural law. Arguing that nature’s tendency to variation made it an inappropriate foundation for truth claims, he urged a more historical and flexible view of scriptural authority.²²

    Defenses of and satirical attacks upon women continued throughout Elizabeth’s reign. Pamphleteers used dialogues to present both sides of the argument with nearly equal weight, creating sharply caricatured characters to serve as mouthpieces for the most controversial points. Although most authors allowed female defenders to win the debate, misogynist arguments received such a full hearing that the net effect may have been to perpetuate dualistic images of women’s nature as well as of nature itself. Ambivalent and contradictory portraits of women also communicated to readers that women were unstable and dangerous to men unless contained and controlled.²³

    Although she did not silence patriarchal definitions of power, Elizabeth appears to have temporarily disrupted them. She presented writers with a continuing challenge to reconcile her femaleness with traditional symbols of power. Some limited their use of patriarchal metaphors for communicating her power, emphasizing instead her exceptional and androgynous qualities, while others abandoned the project of arguing her fatherly right to her subjects’ fealty altogether. Overt claims that monarchs deserved absolute obedience as fathers emerged in full force only after Elizabeth’s successor, James I, took the throne in 1603.²⁴

    Elizabeth supplemented her tenuous patriarchal claims with a powerful public persona as chaste virgin and mother, images that would have been recognizable to most inhabitants of her newly Protestant realm. The popular association of the queen with the Virgin Mary began during the mid-1570s as Elizabeth entered her forties and appeared to be past her childbearing years. Comparisons with the Virgin Mary, who embodied wisdom and purity rather than the natural world, allowed Elizabeth to overcome images of changeable female nature, a transcendence of gender reflected in her conservative motto semper eadam (always the same). Elizabeth thus presented the antithesis of the lusty daughter of Eve popular in the misogynist literature of the time.²⁵

    But Elizabeth’s acclaimed celibacy also defied the literature celebrating marriage and extolling virtuous and obedient wives. Through her refusal to grant any man official sexual access to her body, Elizabeth could powerfully present herself as a suitable spouse for the realm. In a speech delivered by proxy to Parliament in 1558, she announced: I have long since made choice of a husband, the kingdom of England … charge me not with the want of children, forasmuch as everyone of you, and every Englishman besides, are my children. Reversing monarchical gender imagery, Elizabeth became mother to all English subjects. Like the Virgin Mary, Elizabeth’s identity and authority were both virtuous and maternal.²⁶

    Elizabeth also used her virginity as a metaphor for England’s military inviolability. As Louis Montrose has shown, Elizabeth occasionally identified her female person with the English realm, likening her maidenhood to England’s successful defense of its coast from the Spanish threat. Adopting the tone of a virgin outraged by an assault upon her chastity, she presented herself as an energetic female defender of the realm’s virtue, a role complementary to that of chaste spouse and mother.²⁷

    Throughout her thirties and forties, Elizabeth continued to navigate a treacherous course of entertaining marriage proposals from foreign princes and presenting herself as a sexually inactive vessel of authority. Her manuevers prompted several public discussions of marriage, in which inegalitarian relations between husband and wife were often touted as the distinguishing characteristic of a civilized people. Painting egalitarian marital relations with the brush of heathenism, the main female character in Edmund A. Tilney’s Brief and Pleasant Discourse of Duties in Mariage (1568) declared her belief that equality in marriage was a Barbarian custom … to be disanulled, and contemned of Christians. Tilney’s Erasmian character similarly abhorred marital equality, remarking that both divine and humaine lawes, in our religion giveth the man absolute authoritie, over the woman in all places.²⁸

    As long as she remained unmarried, Elizabeth could redeem the violation of nature incurred by ruling women with a public image of virginity. Ruling through a unique authority constructed from the male right of kings, a female personification of the realm, and the virtue of chaste wife

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