| Book Review | Law and History Review, 23.2

Book Review

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

Voice and speech are powerful metaphors for social and political agency. Long associated with democratic ideals, voice and speech play a prominent role in a number of progressive scholarly projects today. In history, law, and political science, the spoken word is the central metaphor for an inclusive social agenda. Historians comb the archives for records that will help them give voice to the "inarticulate." Legal scholars argue for the power of neglected narratives to challenge structures of authority. Political scientists imagine a deliberative democracy that draws much of its power from citizens telling their stories to one another. In my own field of literary studies, the symbolism of voice is regarded with more ambivalence. Jacques Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of presence that is associated with the spoken word in the Western tradition has produced substantial—and often warranted—skepticism about the liberatory power of speech.

In Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia, Terri L. Snyder draws on methodologies from history and law, as well as evidence from ballads, plays, and novels, to analyze the complex symbolic and literal roles played by female speech in the shaping of early Virginia. Taking her title from a 1662 Virginia statute designed to control disruptive female speech, Snyder notes that "brabbling signified a wrangling, quibbling, quarrelsome, or riotous disposition" (2). The statute made a previously ungendered type of speech into a gendered mode of discourse and identified the voices of unruly women as a major source of domestic and political disorder in the colony. Snyder defines "disorderly speech" expansively to include not only written records of speech but also literary representations of the spoken word. Physical acts such as raising a hoe or a stick are also forms of "brabbling."

Snyder usefully highlights the transatlantic literary sources that portray women's speech as a threat to social order. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, English popular and theatrical culture manifested a broad concern with the nature and power of women's speech. As Leah S. Marcus's recent work has shown, one of Elizabeth's major challenges as queen was to master both the scene of monarchical speech and its requisite rhetorical forms. One of the more suggestive implications of Snyder's work is that the colony named for the virgin queen accumulated negative associations with unruly female speech in a kind of representational displacement of the anxieties about female power and social order. In numerous popular ballads as well as in Aphra Behn's play The Widow Ranter and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, Virginia became identified with "brabbling women" who defied the patriarchal order of law and family as they struggled to "empower themselves" (2) through speech acts.

Snyder uses the literary evidence to thicken an otherwise thin set of sources on women's speech in the colony. The Virginia General Court records have been lost, leaving Snyder to comb the York Country court records for cases where women's words are significantly represented, or more generally where women's speech played a role in the outcome of a case. She presents her study as an instance of "microhistory" and suggests that the "close textual analysis of women's speech" (7) represented in these admittedly "exceptional" (8) cases reveals "the ways in which a variety of free and unfree women challenged and negotiated political and domestic structures of authority, and the resistance or success they encountered in doing so" (17). Snyder is attentive to the multiply mediated quality of the women's voices that she finds in legal documents. Moreover she is careful to note the distinctly mixed results that attended brabbling speech in a variety of areas, including participation in political culture, struggles over sexual autonomy, resistance to patriarchal authority, assertions of female mastery, and control over the governance of households. Yet despite the somewhat mixed results for the women involved, Snyder retains the association of speech with political and social agency that informs her methodological models in historiography and legal studies.

One reason for this persistent attachment to a liberatory model of female speech appears in Snyder's conclusion on eighteenth-century Virginia. Recent work in colonial British North American gender history by Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Jane Kamensky, Mary Beth Norton, and Kathleen M. Brown contrasts the relatively inclusive political, legal, and social arrangements of New England and Virginia in the seventeenth century with the more patriarchal, exclusive, and Anglo-centric practices of the eighteenth century. Snyder follows this well-established historical narrative, noting that women's speech grew more subdued in the genteel colonial society of the eighteenth century. Noting analogous transformations in women as represented in "print culture," and despite some prominent counter-examples including William Byrd II's wife Lucy Byrd, Snyder insists that the apparent taming of women's voices corresponds to a "diminution in women's public, political, and legal agency" (143).

The unexplored assumption here is one that readers would do well to recognize as a modern shibboleth: that authentic expression and challenges to authority are best achieved in dissenting or resistant speech. Snyder accepts the current dichotomy between (in her terms) brabbling speech and civility, and she maps that opposition onto discrete historical moments. Certainly the forms of language changed substantially in the English-speaking world between 1650 and 1750, but those changes were not limited to women, nor are they easily identified with a shift from resistance to acquiescence.

Snyder's strengths lie in her attention to the way that apparently disparate verbal forms—elite and popular literature, speech in legal records, gossip—work to constitute a social fabric. She enhances our understanding of women's experiences through her ability to tease out the narratives behind the legal records. Her study offers illuminating insights into the texture of women's lives in early Virginia.

Sandra M. Gustafson

University of Notre Dame

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