Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Summary
This book examines how gender and race became intertwined components of the social order in colonial Virginia. She argues: “Discourses of gender, the division of labor by sex, the regulation of white women’s sexuality were integral to the process of defining race and contributed significantly to the establishment of slavery in Virginia during the seventeenth century. Racial slavery, in turn, breathed new life into patriarchal social relations.” Over the course of 150 years, contrasts between the good women and unsupervised wantons (nasty wenches) gave way to a racial opposition in which women of English descent embodied the privileges and virtues of womanhood while women of African descent shouldered the burden of its inherent evil: sexual lust. This transformation was central to the creation of exploitable categories of racial difference. Faced with uncertainties in the colonies (native Americans, environment, high taxes, religious dissenters, outspoken women, and insecurity of property), white males (after the Bacon Rebellion) constructed a gender norm that marginalized women and black males and placed the male (white) in political control. Thus, “The future of Virginia’s system of racial slavery depended not simply on excluding men of African descent from the institutions of political life, but on denying them the privileges of white domestic life, especially access to legal sexual unions with white women.”

See also: Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom