Kathleen Brown's first book, published today, explores the lives of plantation owners and women in colonial America. From her upbringing in historic Boston to her current home in Philadelphia, History Professor Kathleen Brown has always immersed herself in her studies. Brown's first book, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarches, released today, draws from the professor's experiences as it examines the origins of racism in the United States. Throughout the book, Brown examines English female migrants, female servants and plantation owners who faced racism daily as they lived and worked in Colonial Virginia. Brown said their lives illustrated the basis for racism in modern America, but added that her intentions in writing the book were purely optimistic. "The more people who see that the things they think are natural really have a history, the more open they'll be open to changing them," Brown said. "If people are freed up to see that these stereotypes were invented and have a history, they become free to loosen their minds from them." Raised outside Boston near the site of the famous Battle of Lexington, Brown remembers the parades and war re-enactments played out on the town green each year. Growing up in an atmosphere of American history spurred her interest in the country's development. Brown recalled seeing the court-ordered desegregation of public schools in the city, adding that she learned the effects of racial differences while still a young girl. The "anxious patriarches" described in Brown's book were Englishmen who owned plantations, developing new cultural norms to protect their own interests and oppress slaves and lower class women. Only these rich planters possessed power, using it to solidify the Old World social structure based upon class and gender. By denying Africans the basic privileges common to the English populace, the societal structure they produced left Africans as a separate and lower class, Brown argues in the book. Brown uses "nasty wenches" to refer to the common female servants put in the fields, because people believed them incapable of anything else. Their lives represented the roles that African female slaves would later adopt, Brown said. Brown writes that the wenches were denied traditional domestic roles and treated like men -- forced to do grueling work in the tobacco fields of Southern plantations. "African women were put in a position of being used as labor that would not be officially expected of English women," Brown said. The final group of people Brown describes is the "good wives" -- female migrants from England who looked to America for marriage and social advancement. Brown includes the good wives in her book to compare them to the lives of African slaves and female English field hands. Brown, who began her book ten years ago as a doctoral dissertation, said she wanted to compare the groups of people in the book to those in modern America.
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