Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

== Summary ==
This
book examines how gender and race became intertwined components of the social
order in colonial Virginia. She argues: “Discourses of gender, the division of
labor by sex, 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.” Over the course of 150
years, contrasts between the good women and unsupervised wantons (nasty
wenches) gave 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. This transformation
was central to the creation of exploitable categories of racial difference. Faced
with uncertainties in the colonies (native Americans, environment, high taxes,
religious dissenters, outspoken women, and insecurity of property), white males
(after the Bacon Rebellion) constructed a gender norm that marginalized women
and black males and placed the male (white) in political control. Thus, “The
future of Virginia’s system of racial slavery depended not simply on excluding
men of African descent from the institutions of political life, but on denying
them the privileges of white domestic life, especially access to legal sexual
unions with white women.”
See also: Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom