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 blacks, and enslaved men and women continued to influence the meaning of race and class in colonial Virginia.
Background Information
Political thinkers in the South developed reasons for believing that slavery was not just an economic necessity but a moral virtue. Virginia was the site of the first permament English settlement in the American colonies and was the largest state at the founding of the country.