Women in Early JamestownKathleen M. BrownAssociate Professor of History University of Pennsylvania |
| In a newe plantation it is not knowen whether man or woman be more necessary. -Petition of the Virginia Assembly, 1619 |
| Early Virginia history has long been an important source of legends about the founding of the United States. Some of these legends feature women in starring roles, as in the case of Pocahontas, while others use women's victimization-as in the case of the wife who became a meal for her starving husband-as evidence of frontier adversity that would eventually be overcome by triumphant English settlers. In most accounts of early Virginia, however, Jamestown is depicted as a male domain in which women (by which is usually meant English women) had little or no historical significance-that is, their presence had little impact on the sequence of events or the subsequent history of the Virginia colony even if the conditions of their daily lives arouse our curiosity. |
| How important were women to the history of early Jamestown? Do any of the above approaches-woman as Native American heroine, woman as European frontier victim, or woman as politically insignificant companion-accurately capture the historical significance of English, Indian, and African women in England's first permanent mainland settlement? What happens if we set the sensational legends of Jamestown's past in the larger context of European, Indian and African peoples in contact throughout the Americas? How does women's role in the history of early Jamestown compare to that of other European outposts in the New World? |
| Any effort to assess the historical significance of women in the colonial past must begin by considering who is included in the category "women." With the exception of Pocahontas, who made it into popular legend by virtue of the assistance she provided to the English sufferers at Jamestown, white English women have been the focus of most histories of colonial women. In the last two decades, however, scholarship on Native American and African women has raised questions about this focus. It has become increasingly clear that women of at least three races and several different nationalities actively shaped the history of Jamestown. Despite the lopsided sex ratio of four English men for every English woman early in the seventeenth century, the presence of English women as servants, wives, mothers, agricultural workers and highly valued immigrants had a crucial impact on the development of the English settlement at Jamestown. The importance of Indian women to Powhatan society and their interactions with the pale strangers at the "James City" military compound were perhaps even more significant to the history of the region. From 1619 on, African women were also part of the historical tapestry being woven at Jamestown. Brought to Virginia against their will, African women became part of the bound labor force that produced the colony's "gold"-tobacco. When Virginia created the legal framework for slavery, African women were a central concern because of their potential to reproduce the slave labor force. |
| Like most European ventures to the New World, the English venture to Virginia was heavily dominated by men in its early years. All of the 104 settlers who sailed up the James River in 1607 were men. This initial group contained a disproportionate number of well-heeled adventurers, a handful of artisans, and only a small number of the agricultural laborers whose practical experience might have helped the fledgling settlement survive its first winter. The maleness of the landing party at Jamestown and the overwhelmingly male character of the settlement in subsequent years had a huge impact on relations with local Native Americans, who belonged to a military alliance overseen by the paramount chief, Powhatan. The small numbers of English women appear to have fanned Powhatan's hopes that the strangers might be absorbed into his chiefdom through adoption, hospitality, and the provision of food. Powhatan likely masterminded the capture and detention of English commander John Smith in 1608, which concluded with a ritual execution, seemingly stopped by Powhatan's daughter, Pocahontas. Smith claimed that the Indian girl had saved his life and years later wrote an account of her intervention that became the basis for the Pocahontas legend. Powhatan also tried to create a father-son relationship with the recalcitrant Smith, reminding him of the privileges and obligations such a relationship conferred upon him. Powhatan probably also approved of the entertainment provided by Pocahontas's retinue of women, in which young women bedecked in ritual pocones (red paint) crowded John Smith, crying "Love you not mee." As long as the English remained within the protective palisade at Jamestown and Powhatan hoped to integrate them peacefully, war might be avoided. When individuals left the fort, however, they were subject to the tactics of local werowances, which included female werowances like Oppossunoquonuske using the possibility of sexual pleasure to lure unarmed English men into an ambush. (1) |
The imbalanced sex ratio and the lack of experienced agricultural laboring men left the English ill-prepared to deal with the day-to-day needs of a new settlement. This vulnerability also factored greatly in Anglo-Indian relations, driving the fledgling community alternately to negotiate, trade, or raid for the foodstuffs they so desperately needed. Soon after Captain John Smith's return to England to be treated for an injury in 1609, the settlement endured a winter of starvation and death. Having failed to plant or store grain sufficient for their needs and lacking supplies from England, the five hundred person settlement became desperate for food:
most miserable and poore creatures; and those were preserved for the most part, by roots, herbes, acornes, walnuts, berries, now and then a little fish: . . . yea, even the very skinnes of our horses. Nay, so great was our famine, that a Salvage we slew, and buried, the poorer sort tooke him up againe and eat him, and so did divers one another boyled and stewed with roots and herbs: And one amongst the rest did kill his wife, powdered her, and had eaten part of her before it was knowne, for which hee was executed, as hee well deserved.Although the Council later claimed that the man had murdered out of hatred, not hunger, word of the cannibalism spread, provoking John Smith to comment dryly that the dish "powdered [salted or flour-dredged] wife" was unknown to him. (2) |
| Disease also claimed many lives, as the estuarial conditions and undisciplined habits of settlers combined to turn the water into an unwholesome brew. Under John Smith, settlers risked Indian violence to live at a healthier distance from Jamestown. Following Smith's return to England, however, settlers returned to the compound and its unhealthful conditions, raising the death rate from disease. (3) |
Subsequent commanders De La Warr, Gates, and Dale created a set of strict laws and draconian punishments to try to prevent such terrible starvation and disease. A quick glance at the laws reveals other concerns, too: No man shall ravish or force any woma[n], maid or Indian, or other, upon pain of death. . .The laws leave the impression of a settlement in which women's labor, honestly and carefully performed, was in short supply. Unable to rely on a sufficient population of married English women to do domestic tasks out of loyalty or self-interest, the governors of the settlement turned to coercion to prevent further deterioration in the quality of life. |
| Filthy streets and surrounds, illicit trade with Indians, women and men running to the Indians to escape the sordid conditions and strict discipline, crooked laundresses pilfering the laundry they were engaged to wash-these were only some of the difficulties Sir Thomas Dale faced as deputy to the governor of the colony. Chronic shortages of food, fabric, clothing, bedding, household equipment, and tools are reflected in the details of other laws outlining stringent punishments for theft and illicit trade. Actual incidents of punishment inflicted suggest that the laws were not simply paper tigers. Although men were the vast majority of victims who suffered painful and disfiguring corporal punishments, disobedient women were also punished. When several women ordered to make shirts under the regime of Governor Dale dealt with the shortage of cotton thread by unraveling some of the shirting, they were whipped for failing to produce garments of the requisite length. (5) |
| Dale's laws present a grim picture of working life in Jamestown for the colony's female minority. With their rations tied to the performance of traditional female employments like sewing, laundering, cooking and cleaning, but lacking necessary supplies (adequate thread, wash basins, soap, brushes) or the assistance of female neighbors and kin, English women probably found little to be cheerful about in the New World. Although the sex ratio meant that even a woman with few marital opportunities in England might prosper through marriage in Virginia, such a lopsided ratio also might have increased the odds of being assaulted, kidnapped, raped, or pressed into early marriage. Such conditions persisted in the colony until at least the 1620s, as the case of Mara Bucke attests. Bucke, the thirteen-year old orphan of minister Richard Bucke, was at the center of a struggle in 1624 that pitted her guardians, brother-in-law John Burrows and sister Bridget Burrows, against the overseers of her deceased father's estate. Several neighbors heard rumors that a prominent Jamestown resident-they suspected the Reverend David Sandys-planned to "steale Away" Bucke from the Burrows's plantation on the south side of the James River. Perhaps as a preventive measure, Bucke's guardians tried to arrange a marriage with a man they preferred, the reluctant Mr. Richards. Acting on behalf of the overseers of Richard Bucke's estate, the Court took security from Burrows to insure that neither he nor his wife would permit "any motione of marriadge to be made" by their charge. The Reverend Sandys, for his part, successfully sued the parties who suspected him of planning to kidnap Bucke. Bucke, who was described as "dull" witted by two witnesses, remained in the care of Burrows until at least the age of fifteen, after which time she disappears from the records. (6) |
| The suffering within Jamestown during its first decade corresponded with deteriorating relations with Native Americans without. One of the central disagreements concerned the Indian provision of corn to the English. Powhatan may have hoped to take advantage of the English desperation for food to establish his people's dominance, but the English viewed Indian corn as ripe for seizure if it was not given freely. One wonders, too, whether the fact that Indian women produced the vast quantities of corn stored for winter use did not add to the fury of the English at their complete dependence upon "savages." English chroniclers of native life, unwilling or unable to recognize the irony of the failure of their own "civilized" system of agricultural production, certainly spilled much ink descrying the assignment of agricultural labor to Indian women. Beginning in 1609, soon after Smith's departure, Jamestown was mainly at war with Powhatan, forcing the re-entrenchment of settlers within the fort. Allegedly in retaliation against Indian strikes, Commander George Percy led one infamous raid against the Paspahegh Indians in which he massacred Indian children and brought their female werowance back to Jamestown for execution. |
| Percy's brutality towards Indian women and children points to the similarities in the ways the English treated Indians and the Gaelic Irish, whose women and children had also been massacred by English military commanders, and the departure from the usual European code of warfare, under which civilians were understood to be off limits. English views of indigenous women were more complex than Percy's murderous rage would suggest, however. English writers were fascinated with Indian women's bodies-their capacity for strenuous agricultural labor, their well-formed limbs, their clear, bare, skin, decorated with tattoos and paint, and their apparent ability to give birth with little pain. But these observations led them to conflicting conclusions: that Indian women were little better than oppressed drudges whose lives would improve if they gave up their "savage" ways; that Indian women suffered little during childbirth because they lived "natural" lives uncorrupted by the affectations of high society. In both cases, English opinion about Indian women reflected views about English society as much as it rested upon observations of Indians themselves. |
| Indian women also figured in English depictions of their rivalry with Spain. Since the sixteenth century, English publications about the "Black Legend," based on Spain's violent and exploitive treatment of indigenous peoples in the valley of Mexico and in Central and South America, spawned English accounts of their own cultural superiority. Chaste and moral English adventurers, according to these self-serving narratives, declined to have their way with simple primitives. Accounts of the short-lived experiment on Roanoke Island, in which local Indians attributed godlike status to their sexually chaste conquerors, reinforced elite English readers' beliefs in their countrymen's self-discipline and propriety. This interest in distinguishing themselves from Spain appears to have combined with disdain for Indian culture to minimize the sexual contact between elite English men and Indian women. |
| Disdain for Indian savagery and the desire to be chaste, however, appears not to have afflicted all Jamestown's settlers, especially not those men who decided to escape the filth and harsh discipline to join local tribes. Horrible corporal punishments befell those caught by Dale and forced to return to the English. While among the Indians, however, some English men had sexual relations with their Indian hosts. Although unmarried Indian women might have had few incentives to wed Jamestown escapees, who showed little promise of being good providers in Indian terms, they had few moral scruples about casual sexual encounters. Until at least 1618, and possibly until as late as the Indian strike on English settlements in 1622, Powhatan and his successor, brother Opechancanough, still held out some hope of dealing with the English intruders through intermarriage and diplomacy. English men who escaped to Powhatan villages likely received a welcome that included sexual intimacy with Indian women, even if Indian women had little interest in making the relationship permanent. |
| Pocahontas presents a special case of Indian womanhood reframed by the Anglo-Indian encounter. Early in the days of Captain John Smith's governance of Jamestown, Pocahontas was a frequent visitor to the fort. Smith credited her not only with saving his life, but with risking her father's displeasure to warn the English about an impending Powhatan attack. With Smith's return to England and the deterioration of Anglo-Indian relations into open warfare, Pocahontas seems to have played the role of cultural broker less frequently. Yet she remained important enough politically to both groups that Samuel Argall decided to kidnap her in 1613 and use her to ransom English prisoners and weapons. Powhatan responded slowly to English demands, embittering his daughter and probably facilitating her conversion to Christianity and marriage to John Rolfe. He never reconciled himself to her marriage, refusing either to set foot on English territory thereafter or to consent to another daughter's marriage to an Englishman. Despite its coercive foundation and Powhatan's sense of betrayal, Pocahontas's marriage to Rolfe brought about a peace in 1614 that survived longer than Pocahontas herself. Having adopted English clothing and converted to English religion, Pocahontas gave birth to a son and traveled to England to demonstrate the success of the Virginia Company's venture abroad. While in England, she met the king and queen and other members of the English aristocracy. She also crossed paths with John Smith, whom she apparently never forgave for his casual treatment of her father and herself. Ultimately, a respiratory disease prevented her from making the return trip to Virginia, and she died in Gravesend, England in 1617. Had she lived, she might have continued to be an important cultural broker and a mentor to her son, Thomas Rolfe. |
| Even as the Virginia Company showed off Pocahontas as evidence of what the English might accomplish among the "savages," they were developing a new plan for Jamestown that featured English women. As early as 1614, Virginia Company officials and investors began to make noises about making the colony more permanent and solving its vexing problems. Bringing over more English women, particularly women of an elevated social position, seemed to hold great promise. By 1619, Company officials were actively promoting this plan, claiming that the availability of marriageable women would make men work harder, invest more of themselves in the colony, and improve the poor quality of life that discouraged settlers from making Virginia a permanent home. Seeking to transport women who could be married to the colony's prosperous residents, the Company recruited gentlewomen rather than domestic servants and attempted to prevent their marriages to lesser men. Only those investors who could reimburse the Company for transporting and supplying a woman-a fee set at 150 pounds of best leaf tobacco-would be able to compete for a wife. During the next three years, the Company sponsored 147 women to cross the Atlantic to Virginia, most of whom met Company standards for gentility and breeding. Such a small number of women did little to change the skewed sex ratio, however, which remained severely out of balance until after mid-century. (7) |
| One of the women to cross the Atlantic under the Company's recruitment plan was Alice Richards, a twenty-five year old widow. Richards came highly recommended by the churchwarden of her London parish who claimed that, in the six years of her residence in St. James at Clarckenwell, "shee hathe demeaned herself in honest sorte & is a woman of an honest lyef & conversation." Richards was one of only three widows to arrive in this initial shipment of fifty-seven "maids." More typical of the age and experience of this pool of female migrants was Ann Jackson. Like many of the other women, Jackson was single and twenty years old. Born in Wiltshire, she was the daughter of a gardener and crossed the Atlantic in the company of her brother, John. Both Richards and Jackson likely began their lives in Virginia with clothing and bedding provided by the Company, including a petticoat, waistcoat, stockings, garters, smocks, gloves, a hat, an apron, two pairs of shoes, a towel, two head coifs, a crosscloth, a pair of sheets, and a rug. Both likely married within months of their arrival in autumn 1621, although it is not known whether either woman survived the Powhatan attack upon English settlements in 1622. (8) |
| The Virginia Company's 1619 decision to recruit English women and turn their colonial outpost into a permanent English settlement coincided with several momentous events in the history of Jamestown, and ultimately, for the history of women in Virginia. That same year, shipments of the best grade of Virginia tobacco sold for three shillings a pound, signaling the beginning of the colony's tobacco boom. After several years of experimentation by Pocahontas's husband, John Rolfe, it appeared that the colony had finally found its export crop. Throughout the 1620s, residents of Virginia were hot in pursuit of tobacco profits, growing the "stinking weed" wherever they could, including in the streets of Jamestown. Any chance of diversifying the economy according to the original Virginia Company plan or of encouraging English women's domestic labor disappeared with the successful cultivation of tobacco. From 1619 on, English women as well as men were likely to devote at least some of their labor to hoeing, tilling, worming, or harvesting the crop. For English women, this represented a significant departure from their customary role in agricultural labor, which was as supplementary laborers during harvest time or as cultivators of market gardens. English women had never assumed primary responsibility for cultivating staple crops like wheat, which required plows. Rather, their primary responsibility was for the domestic labor that maintained the household, which included the production of food and supplies, and the provision of services like cooking, healing, and cleaning. The scarcity of women, the lack of domestic markets, and the killing that could be made from tobacco, at least during its first decades of production, discouraged the development of a domestic economy through the production and exchange of butter, cheese, beer, or homespun fabric-all of which were the provenance of women in England (and later in New England). Until she married and her household could afford to replace her labor with that of a servant man or woman, an able-bodied English woman in Virginia would probably spend at least part of her day doing labor related to tobacco production. |
| Also by 1619, the distinctive pattern of many English settlements in North America, characterized by the low frequency of sexual unions between Anglo men and indigenous women, might have begun to emerge in Virginia. American historians have offered vague explanations for this pattern, hinting that an English national proclivity for chastity, a sense of cultural superiority leading to disdain for intimate contact with indigenous peoples, or the deterioration of Anglo-Indian relations into open warfare all were responsible for the relatively smaller mestizo population in British America than in Spanish or French America. But such explanations are partial and problematic, overlooking important factors that deserve our consideration. |
| One reason for this demographic development in Virginia may have been changing Indian tactics. Opechancanough, who succeeded Powhatan sometime in 1618, had largely abandoned the strategy of integrating the intruders, whose demands for land had led to encroachments on Indian territory surrounding Jamestown. If, indeed, any Indian women had seriously considered intermarriage before 1619, after that date taking an English mate would have been met with Indian disapproval. |
| Although evidence is sparse, it seems that after 1619 English men had also lost what little non-sexual incentive they might have had to engage in sexual relations with Indian women. Unlike their Spanish counterparts to the south, who relied on unions with indigenous women to gain title to land or labor, or their French coureurs des bois (woodsmen) brethren to the north, whose unions with Indian women gained them access to fur-trading networks, English settlers had little hope of advancing themselves through intermarriage in Virginia. Indian women of the region offered no entree to lucrative fur trading networks and marrying them did not automatically entitle English men to land. Perhaps most important, Indian women, like their menfolk, had resisted all efforts to conquer them to exploit their labor. English settlers would have had little reason to hope that marriage to an indigenous woman would gain them access to Indian labor. |
| In addition to failing to provide labor, native peoples presented obstacles to acquiring land for tobacco cultivation. Virginia's turn to tobacco cultivation after 1619 meant that individual wealth would thereafter depend upon access to land in the form of property ownership. The Virginia Company's provision of incentives for family migrations by issuing fifty acres of land for each migrant (a distribution system known as headright that enabled women to gain access to land) encouraged this turn to family building and familial property-holding, even as it set the colony on a collision course with the region's indigenous population. |
| Different national proclivities in and of themselves also fail to account for the relatively low frequency of unions between English men and Indian women in Virginia. In other contexts, English men readily formed interracial unions in the pattern of the Spanish and the French. Members of the British Hudson Bay Company, for example, engaged in interracial relationships much like those of their French counterparts in the fur trade. The type of commercial economy a colony developed rather than national traits thus appears to have been the most important factor in determining whether European men recruited Indian women for sexual relationships and whether Indian women found that recruitment attractive enough to accept. |
| To understand this pattern of interracial sexual unions, then, we must look to the type of colonial economy developing in Virginia-agriculture rather than mining or fur trade-and the lack of need for Indian resources other than land to succeed. Changing Indian strategies for dealing with the intruders, moreover, dampened Indian women's interest in forging cross-cultural unions. Together, these two factors conspired to limit the value and frequency of Anglo-Indian unions in Virginia after 1619. |
| Another major event of 1619 that was to materially transform the Virginia colony and the meaning of womanhood within it was the arrival of twenty Africans in the Treasurer. The English vessel's journey to the James River reflected Virginia's location in an Atlantic world being remade by plantation agriculture and the African slave trade. The new arrivals likely originated in the Portuguese colony of Angola, where they had been enslaved as a result of an Imbangala raid. Before beginning their Atlantic voyage on a Portuguese slave ship, the twenty Africans would have been given instruction in Christianity and baptized, as was required of all Portuguese slaves. Historian Engel Sluiter has speculated that the Africans ended up in Virginia, rather than Vera Cruz, as a consequence of Dutch and perhaps even English aggression against the Portuguese vessel. In subsequent years, other Africans from the same region would make their way to Virginia by a similar path. (9) |
| One such woman was noted in the colony's records only as "Mary a Negro Woman." Mary had come to Virginia on the Margarett and John in 1622, just months after the Powhatan attack on English settlements. Her name suggests that, like her fellow enslaved Angolans, she had been baptized before her arrival in the colony. In 1625, when the colony's muster listed twenty-three Africans, Mary was one of ten African women. Within a few years she seems to have married an African named Anthony and moved to Virginia's Eastern Shore, where the couple purchased land and raised a family. Fortunate to have reached adulthood before the colony firmed up laws defining slavery, Mary and her husband enjoyed a measure of freedom that later African arrivals to the colony would not be permitted. (10) |
| Probably fewer than half of the Africans who sailed to Virginia during the first twenty years of English settlement were female, but their impact would be much greater than their numbers. English settlers had already encountered Native American cultures whose notions of womanhood were different from their own. The presence of bound African women, who performed agricultural labor but also produced children, forced planters to articulate their conflicting ideas about slavery and the meaning of respectable womanhood in a tobacco-producing society. It was no accident that laws dealing with African women's reproductive and productive capacities were at the center of the efforts to define the condition of slavery in Virginia. In 1643, Virginia's lawmakers took the unprecedented step of making African women "tithable"(taxable), a legal categorization that applied only to men. And in 1662, lawmakers dealt with the thorny issue of children fathered by Anglo men born to bound African women by declaring slave status heritable through the mother. Together, these laws represented a new departure for defining the meaning of race in the colony. (11) |
| Even if one considers only the early history of the Jamestown settlement, an era during which English and African women were scarce, one is confronted with a rich and multicultural history in which women played significant parts. Pocahontas and the "powdered wife" present us with two seemingly opposite possibilities for women, as political actors and as victims, but the historical reality is much more complex. As pilfering laundresses, marriageable nieces, transported gentlewomen, sexual partners, and field labors, women of many colors and nationalities became part of the historical tapestry of Jamestown. Their lives and their points of view were as varied as those of their menfolk, defying our efforts to reduce them to caricatures. |
| Suggested Readings: Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1996. Brown, Kathleen M. "In Search of Pocahontas," in Nancy Rhoden and Ian Steele, eds., The Human Tradition in Colonial America, pp. 71-96. Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1999. Lebsock, Suzanne. "A Share of Honour": Virginia Women, 1600-1945. Richmond: The Virginia Women's Cultural History Project, 1984. Ransome, David R. "Wives for Virginia, 1621." William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., XLVIII (1991):3-18. Sluiter, Engel. "New Light on the '20 and Odd Negroes' Arriving in Virginia, August 1619." William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., LIV (1997):395-398. Thornton, John. "The African Experience of the '20 and Odd Negroes' Arriving in Virginia in 1619." William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., LV (1998):421-434. End Notes:1 Kathleen M. Brown, "In Search of Pocahontas," in Nancy Rhoden and Ian Steele, eds., The Human Tradition in Colonial America, (Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1999), pp. 71-96; Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1996), p. 67. 2 John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles . . . (1624) in Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 3 vols., (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986), II:232-233. 3 Carville V. Earle, "Environment, Disease, and Mortality in Early Virginia," in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society & Politics, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1979), pp. 96-125. 4 "Articles, Lawes, and Orders, Divine, Politique, and Martiall for the Colony of Virginia," in Peter Force, ed. Tracts and Other Papers, Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, From the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776, 4 vols., (Washington, D. C.: 1836; reprint, Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1963), III:9-19. 5 Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, p. 85. 6 H.R. McIlwaine, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia, 2nd ed. (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 1979), pp. 15-18, 100-109. 7 David R. Ransome, "Wives for Virginia, 1621," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. XLVIII (1991):3-18. 8 Ransome, "Wives for Virginia." 9 Engel Sluiter, "New Light on the '20 and Odd Negroes' Arriving in Virginia, August 1619," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. LIV (1997):396-398; John Thornton, "The African Experience of the '20 and Odd Negroes' Arriving in Virginia in 1619," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., LV (1998):421-434. 10 Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, pp. 107-116. 11 Ibid., pp. 108-136. |