The Scholar
Kathleen M. Brown is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in early American gender, race, and slavery. She earned her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and was mentored by Edmund Morgan during her graduate studies. Her work on colonial Virginia earned her the Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association.
Brown’s scholarship is distinctive in how it insists that gender cannot be separated from the development of racial slavery. She traces how laws about reproduction, inheritance, and labor status were shaped by anxieties about womanhood, family, and lineage.
Braiding the Categories
In Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs (1996), Brown reveals how gender, race, and power were woven together in colonial Virginia. She shows that the legal categories of slavery did not emerge from pure economics – they emerged through anxiety about reproduction and legitimacy. When the colonial assembly decided that a child’s status would follow the mother rather than the father, they were not making an administrative decision. They were making a racial one. Enslaved women would bear enslaved children indefinitely, securing the labor supply without burdening masters with responsibility.
Brown tracks how white patriarchy became defined in opposition to Black femininity. The “good wife” of the English gentry stood against the “nasty wenches” of Black and Native women whose sexuality was deemed dangerous, unruly, exploitable. Race solidified through gender norms – and gender norms were rewritten to serve slavery.
The Bridge to the Archive
Brown gives the Archive its understanding of the intimate. Most histories of slavery focus on fields, auctions, and laws written at the assembly. Brown zooms in on the body itself – how reproductive control became the mechanism of hereditary bondage. She shows that the archive must account for women’s experience as central to the system’s operation, not peripheral to it.
Her work also explains why the Family category exists at all. When you study the breakdown of Black kinship, you are studying the deliberate unraveling of a system designed around maternal transmission of enslaved status. Brown shows the blueprint for that unraveling.