A Decided Lack of Female Solidarity
Friday, March 18, 2022 - 21:09
Just because an article isn't relevant to the focus of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project doesn't mean it isn't interesting. This one is an incisive look into intra-household politics in Colonial Virginia--I believe the only article in the collection that doesn't focus on England.
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Brown, Kathleen M. 1999. “’A P[ar]cell of Murdereing Bitches’: Female Relationships in an Eighteenth-Century Slaveholding Household” in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England edited by Susan Frye & Karen Robertson. Oxford University Press, New York. ISBN 0-19-511735-2
Brown, Kathleen M. ’A P[ar]cell of Murdereing Bitches’: Female Relationships in an Eighteenth-Century Slaveholding Household”
Like the previous paper, this one--the first in the section on “Alliances in the Household”--is not of direct relevance to the Project. It focuses on the context of an infanticide trial in early 18th century Virginia in which the accused was a prominent landowning white widow. Within a female-centered household that included people of various races and positions, including both free servants and enslaved people, the inter-personal connections and the ways in which the participants managed the communication of knowledge about the dead child demonstrate a dynamic more complex than “a female community” or class and racial divides. The analysis is fascinating but I’ll leave it at that.
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