Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs.

Sometimes it takes two books to tell a story, and to tell the story of colonial Virginia it takes three or even four. For now we must add to Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom, Kathleen Brown's Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Together these two books provide the formative context of class, race, and gender within which we must now read such other synthetic works as Rhys Issac's The Transformation of Virginia and Alan Kulikoff's Tobacco and Slaves.

In 1975, in a book which has left an indelible imprint, Edmund Morgan portrayed the implicit bargain by which slavery and its attendant ideology became the ground for a relative peace between the various classes of white males contending for power in colonial Virginia. Kathleen Brown now adds gender to the grounds of white male, and above all of planter power in eighteenth-century Virginia. Her aim is two-fold and penetrating: she aims to show that gender was the door through which a species of racism entered colonial Virginia, and to develop fully the sense in which gender was in its own right a continuing ground of white male power in general, and of patriarchal gentry power in particular, in this peculiar corner of the British Empire.

The central premise of this study is that the various, and occasionally competing, discourses on 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.

The first of her propositions, namely that gender was the portal of race - and the statements offered here do not do justice to Brown's arguments - is developed in a sometimes diffuse, sometimes tentative, sometimes ideological narrative across the first half or two-thirds of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches. In the end, Brown's initial proposition comes across as an impressively intelligent argument, as provocative and persuasive in its own way as Edmund Morgan's case was in its fashion. It seems possible that gender was the category of negative identity which, in a complex discourse, became midwife to the emergence of African race as a further such category, a category constructed, almost uniquely at first, in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Virginia. In which case, Morgan's peace among white males was grounded in gender before being grounded in the further naturalized metaphor of race. Taken further, Brown's argument is powerful in explaining the possible origins of the enduring link between gender and race in the southern mind, a link seen so clearly, for example, in the recent work of Stephanie McCurry on antebellum South Carolina. Taken further still, Brown leads me to wonder whether by 1750 southern males thought of themselves as the last real men on the model of a past patriarchal age, desperately asserting their colonial manhood as the last real manhood amid a rising tide of feminized European sensibility and inchoate, colonized races. Once the Revolution removed the restraints of such English fashions as sensibility and humanitarianism, this violently assertive, defensive, atavistic colonial masculinity came to the fore in Virginia, and even more so in antebellum South Carolina, determined never again to fall victim to the slavery of modern sensibilities. Gender, race, and history had combined to make southern manhood a bizarre but enduring artifact.

Nowhere is this possibility more evident than in Brown's treatment of her second proposition, namely that gender continued to be as central as race, as well as inseparable from it, in the minds above all of the emerging Virginia gentry in the first half of the eighteenth century. This second part of the book is a masterpiece. Everything I have tried to say in my own work, and everything a tortured Virginian named Robert Bolling tried to comment upon in his own writings, is beautifully exposed in the last hundred pages of Brown's book. She leaves no doubt that, in her mind, it was the special demands of the colonial enterprise - the corrosive skepticism of ordinary colonists, men and women alike, the "necessary" deviations from true gentility represented by a cash-crop economy and by slavery, the implicit feminization of aspiring colonial men by metropolitan contempt - which made control of gender, as well as of slaves, a fetish among the emerging Virginia gentry. "Passionate women and negroes" became, of necessity, the anti-types of precarious colonial male gentility and masculinity, and into these anti-types, as a powerful illustration at the end of the book demonstrates, Virginian gentlemen had projected what were in fact their own lusts and violence. Once English scrutiny was removed, there was no check on this "manhood."

It has in the past been so difficult for such historians as Gerda Lerner, Brown's original inspiration and mentor, and Brown herself, to gain a hearing for such readings of a sometimes painfully clear historical record, that those who write this kind of history can easily fall into a self-defeating stridency. Not in this book, for there is much that is powerful and moving in it. It is a work both of original research and of masterful synthesis of others' work. Flashes of humanity illuminate all participants within the larger frame - free Black mothers going to court to save their children, forced by law into long indentures, from being turned into lifetime slaves; the dramatic pairing of Landon Carter and William Byrd, whom otherwise prominent historians might not link, together in a single, complex cultural agony; the simple fact offered us (which I had missed) that Byrd's second wife, Maria, thought of him as a "complacent, generous, tender husband" - and these vignettes remind us that the human heart beats, alarmed, frightened, and tender, within all cultural frames.

Jefferson, now incessantly in our book reviews and on our televisions, was of this culture as well as on some level a rebel against it. He was a slave owner who built a big house, yet when young had not been in the league of the major planters of the establishment, and had attacked their use of entail to tie up much of the land in Virginia. How shall we view him? To him the Enlightenment was control and masculinity as well as politically useful rhetoric about liberty. Ken Burns is telling us, with some help from Joseph Ellis, that this Virginia planter was a "paradox" who held slaves but in some sense truly believed in liberty. In a recent New York Review of Books (February 20) Gordon Wood reminds us that it is not Jefferson's feet of clay, the feet of an eighteenth-century slaveholder still partially set in the beliefs of his age, that matter; rather, it is his "transcendent statements" we need to honor, statements in which the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness seem to be extended to all. (Flashes of simple humanity illuminate Jefferson, too; the parting words from Tristram Shandy he shared with his dying wife would break a heart of stone.) But we can never know how fully he participated, deep within himself, in the hopes his rhetoric excites in us, hopes of liberty for all. Perhaps the "transcendence" is mostly ours. Perhaps what we honor in him is his rhetoric, which moves our hearts to a transcendent faith in all human beings Jefferson either never imagined or could not reach.

Kenneth Lockridge University of Montana