| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England. By Ann M. Little. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. x, 262 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8122-3965-2.)

In Abraham in Arms Ann M. Little investigates the role that ideas of a gendered social order played in constructions of warfare and national identity in the northeastern borderlands— the frontiers of New England and New France—between the establishment of Plymouth Colony in 1620 and the conquest of Canada in 1760. Little argues that in that region, where religious, cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries were unstable, discussions of warfare and conquest were interpreted by both Indians and Europeans within a framework of gender and family life. Concepts such as the role of the father, the orderly family, and constructions of masculinity shaped how Europeans and Indians related to one another. Little concludes that "gender and family differences were ... central to the language and ideology of conquest and were the key principles upon which the theories of difference were constructed" (p. 5). New Englanders questioned Indians' and Canadians' claims to independence and sovereignty by identifying them as inadequate fathers and patriarchs and, thus, ultimately justified their wars of conquest.

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