Beyond the Great Debates: Gender and Race in Early America

Beyond the Great Debates: Gender and Race in Early America Kathleen M. Brown (bio) Several debates animated the early American history I studied as a graduate student in the mid-1980s. Two of these captured my imagination, eventually drawing me from nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s history to the study of gender and race in the colonial period. The first focused on the status of women, by which historians usually meant white women. Turning on the acceptance or rejection of the so-called “golden age” theory, which posited that early American women enjoyed a brief period of high status relative to both their English sisters and their nineteenth-century counterparts, this debate pitted scholars who believed women’s lives had deteriorated after 1800 against those who thought women’s lives had been equally dismal before 1800. Nothing less than the assignment of blame for women’s subordination was at stake. Were the root causes of that subordination already in place when the English settled North America? Or could a significant portion of the blame be laid at the door of industrial capitalism? 1 The second debate that brought colonial history to life for me was an older debate about the emergence of racial slavery in the southern colonies. Often put as simply as “which came first, racism or slavery,” this debate assessed the reasons for the turn to slave labor and the consequences that followed from it. Was chattel slavery the inevitable result of the deep-rooted racial prejudice of seventeenth-century British planters? Or did racial prejudice arise only after planters had embraced slavery as their new labor system? Like the debate over women’s status, this debate, known to many as the “origins debate,” was as much about origins as causes, compelling historians to offer a chronology of when racial inequality began. 2 Although these debates had much in common, key differences distinguished them. Whereas the debate over women’s status revolved around implicit comparisons of colonial women to their antebellum counterparts, thus inviting comment from specialists in both time periods, the origins debate had been first and foremost a discussion among colonial historians about slavery in early America, an agenda that set them apart from scholars of antebellum slavery. Second, in contrast to the newness of the debate over women’s status and the continued interest of scholars in it throughout the [End Page 96] early 1980s, the debate over race and slavery, begun in the late 1950s, had lost some of its urgency with the publication of Edmund S. Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), thought by many to be the last word on the subject. 3 Owing in part to this difference in timing, each debate also assumed a different relationship to the constituencies whose histories it engaged. During its heyday, the origins debate had focused mainly on white attitudes towards Africans rather than on Africans themselves. With few exceptions, for example, Peter Wood’s Black Majority (1974) and Gerald Mullin’s Flight and Rebellion (1972), both of which placed enslaved African men at the center of the narrative, most historians depicted Africans as bystanders victimized by the white architects, usually male, of racial oppression and chattel slavery. In contrast, although women’s historians were interested in the institutions and ideologies contributing to women’s subordination, they were equally concerned with documenting white women’s own experiences. Thus, in both Linda Kerber’s and Mary Beth Norton’s pioneering studies of women during the American Revolution, both published in 1980, women’s participation in the war and its impact on their lives were the main issues. As was true of the origins debate, however, the early scholarship on colonial women defined its historical constituency narrowly, in the latter case, to focus mainly on well-to-do Anglo-American women from northern colonies. 4 As scholars in both fields began to consider issues other than those generated by these debates, some initial differences between the two fields began to fade. Historians of early American race and slavery shifted their attention to enslaved people and the institution of slavery, a movement foreshadowed by Mullin and Wood, as interest in slave culture temporarily eclipsed interest in...