| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia. By Terri L. Snyder. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. xiv, 182 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8014-4052-1.)

Terri L. Snyder's rich examination of women's lives through early Virginia court records and literature makes an important contribution to the scholarly debates about women's status. Women of different ranks—from governor's wife to slave—come alive in her pages, alive enough for us to be able to glimpse their struggles and their anguish and, occasionally, to savor (or even laugh at) their victories. When Lady Berkeley, wife of the governor of Virginia, orders the common hangman to drive the coach that is to pick up the royal commissioners who have been investigating Bacon's rebellion, for example, we feel the deliciousness of her insult as she watches their response from an upstairs window (p. 31). Likewise, the many bruises and "blackish" breast of Mary Rawlins (p. 103) make us keenly aware, in an almost visual way, of what a master's power to discipline a white servant really meant, in both its strengths and its potential limits. Likewise, her textured discussion of two cases reveals how difficult it was to convict a white man of sexual assault, whether mediated by promises or outright violence, even on a woman/wife with babe in arms.

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