Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs

“Meticulously researched, carefully reasoned, and gracefully written, this book should be on the reading list of every historian.”—American Historical Review

“Brown has provided us with a major reinterpretation of colonial Virginia that revises the tale told by Edmund S. Morgan, Winthrop Jordan, and Rhys Isaac. In the process she has told a story of constricting avenues of informal power and authority for women without reconstructing an earlier ‘golden age.’ This is no small feat.”—Journal of American History

“An ambitious work, elaborate in construction and prodigious in research. . . . It could reshape profoundly our understanding of the history of colonial Virginia. . . . This big book is intriguing, provocative, and deeply unsettling.”—Journal of Southern History

“One of the most important and interesting books ever published about colonial Virginia history."—Virginia Libraries

"This book is . . . crucial to our understanding not only of gender but of race and power in colonial Virginia.”—Journal of Southwest Georgia History

“Should be a standard purchase for all academic libraries with holdings in U.S. history.” —CHOICE

“Kathleen Brown’s magnificent book, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, places gender at the center of early Virginia history for the first time. Her interpretations are persuasive because they are informed by judicious use of feminist theories and by an insistence that early Virginia was a changing tri-racial society.”—Allan Kulikoff, Northern Illinois University

“In the early days of women’s history, its practitioners promised that the study of women would one day change the way we look at history itself. Arguing that gender and sexuality were central to the development of both slavery and the eighteenth century’s plantation elite, Kathleen Brown makes good on that promise.” —Suzanne Lebsock, University of Washington

“Kathleen Brown has written an important book that is going to revolutionize our understanding of colonial Virginia, of the origins of slavery, and of the role of gender in the evolution of early American society. . . . An admirable combination of sophisticated conceptual design and richly textured and original data . . . that will have a major intellectual impact across the fields of American history.” —Drew Gilpin Faust, author of Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War