| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Within Her Power: Propertied Women in Colonial Virginia. By Linda L. Sturtz. (New York: Routledge, 2002. xvi, 278 pp. Cloth, $85.00, ISBN 0-415-92855-9. Paper, $23.95, ISBN 0-415-92882-6.)

Widowed Jane Vobe and Anne Pattison took up their husbands' tavern-keeping businesses; Elizabeth Vaulx managed her husband's five-hundred-acre farm and warehouses in his absence; Mary Durley corresponded with the Londoner Mary Parker to settle their trading accounts when their husbands died. A familiar enough picture of colonial women—if we are in New England. But these women lived in Virginia. Indeed, it is Linda L. Sturtz's objective to counter the current scholarship that emphasizes the overweening power of white men in colonial Virginia and to assert some female agency even in that patriarchal context. Her meticulous researches have yielded many examples of individual propertied women, although how to gauge their overall societal significance is not quite clear. Ultimately, while her book provides a new view and some important insights on colonial Virginian women, this reader remains impressed by the remarkable adaptability and strength of patriarchy through the colonial and revolutionary periods.

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