What do you think?
Rate this book
Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina
Over the course of the eighteenth century, race came to seem as corporeal as sex. Kirsten Fischer has mined unpublished court records and travel literature from colonial North Carolina to reveal how early notions of racial difference were shaped by illicit sexual relationships and the sanctions imposed on those who conducted them. Fischer shows how the personal―and yet often very public―sexual lives of Native American, African American, and European American women and men contributed to the new racial order in this developing slave society. Liaisons between European men and native women, among white and black servants, and between servants and masters, as well as sexual slander among whites and acts of sexualized violence against slaves, were debated, denied, and recorded in the courtrooms of colonial North Carolina. Indentured servants, slaves, Cherokee and Catawba women, and other members of less privileged groups sometimes resisted colonial norms, making sexual choices that irritated neighbors, juries, and magistrates and resulted in legal penalties and other acts of retribution. The sexual practices of ordinary people vividly bring to light the little-known but significant ways in which notions of racial difference were alternately contested and affirmed before the American Revolution. Fischer makes an innovative contribution to the history of race, class, and gender in early America by uncovering a detailed record of illicit sexual exchanges in colonial North Carolina and showing how acts of resistance to sexual rules complicated ideas about inherent racial difference.
265 pages, Paperback
First published November 15, 2001
5 people are currently reading
50 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 14, 2022
Read this for grad school, and we read Colonial Complexions by Sharon Block before this. I feel like this truly aided my understanding of the argument Kirsten Fischer was trying to make in regards to the gradual formation of racial identities through out the eighteenth century. If anyone is struggling to see that, try reading Block’s book first (which is very short -120 pages!).
Otherwise, Fischer has really interesting analyses of court documents and really illuminates the experiences of women in colonial North Carolina. However, my quibble is there are time when she brings up certain populations/communities (ie: Native American women, Quaker Women,) makes really good one off points, and then just never ties them back into the narrative.
Otherwise, Fischer has really interesting analyses of court documents and really illuminates the experiences of women in colonial North Carolina. However, my quibble is there are time when she brings up certain populations/communities (ie: Native American women, Quaker Women,) makes really good one off points, and then just never ties them back into the narrative.
May 12, 2013
I had to return this to the library, which does away with my plans of writing a chapter-by-chapter review in order to discuss what's unique to Suspect Relations and distinguish it in my mind from Kathleen Brown's Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs.
But that need to distinguish does point out something worth noting here: Suspect Relations isn't hugely original, and I don't think it's trying to be. Kirsten Fischer has taken approaches already created by Brown and other historians and applied them to colonial North Carolina.
Fischer uses court records, particularly slander suits (in which insults were often recorded verbatim) as an important source for the speech and concerns of non-elite, mostly white men and women whose words aren't otherwise recorded. She's interested in what gender, class, and sexual relations had to do with the crystallization of racial identity and hierarchy in the eighteenth century.
This is all standard fare for the sex-race-gender subfield of Anglo-American history of this period. Another reviewer suggested that Suspect Relations would be suitable for the classroom as a more concise version of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs. Probably true! Good Wives, however, (with the caveat that I haven't finished reading it yet!) is a richer work, because Brown was writing about colonial Virginia, which left a wider and fuller range of documents. The colony of North Carolina was much later established, less closely governed, and lacking in the economic resources that enabled Virginia and South Carolina to develop more fully their plantation slavery systems and their wealthy upper class.
So, as Fischer points out at the beginning, the elites of colonial North Carolina were less powerful and in less control over the rest of the colony than their peers elsewhere, and they knew it. This gives colonial North Carolina somewhat different circumstances for developing its own gender, class, and racial relations.
I'm not sure Fischer does quite enough throughout the book to explain what was different or the same about North Carolina and how this related to its poor-cousin status among the British colonies. She does make some relevant comparisons with the results of other historians' work on Virginia and New England. But, as C. Dallett Hemphill noted in a review in The Journal of American History (vol 89.4, March 2003), Fischer sometimes undermines this by directly applying other historians' conclusions (about other colonies with better historical records) to North Carolina.
I would have liked to see more evidence that Fischer was aware of the details of political history. I know that social historians often try to shift attention away from politics and towards the concerns of those who didn't have direct political representation. But in this situation I think political history is a necessary context. I've just read a lot of the higher-court records from the proprietary period (which supply a number of Fischer's examples) and came to the realization that during some periods these records are suspect not only for the standard reason that they were created by elite white men, but also because the higher courts were themselves a site of political conflict. For instance, during the mid-1720s one of the colonial governors, George Burrington, and the chief justice of the General Court, Christopher Gale, were mortal enemies. A lot of cases of slander and assault that came up in the General Court (including some that involve women) are related to Gale's attempts to drive Burrington out of office and then out of the colony. I don't know whether Burrington and his supporters were really as violent and unruly as Gale's supporters painted them in court, but in a book that relies on a deep connection between kyriarchy and attempts to conquer disorder, I think this is useful context.
My other criticism applies to the sex-race-gender subfield in general. The first part of the book deals with gendered and sexual relations between Native people and North Carolina colonists. (Fischer makes a connection here between gender roles and attitudes to land ownership that I think is pretty important.) However, because Native women almost never appeared in colonial North Carolina court records, as white women, and to a lesser extent African American women did, Fischer relies on a different type of primary source -- travel writings, especially John Lawson's A New Voyage to Carolina. She acknowledges of course that these documents, written by white men, are terribly one-sided, have to be carefully interpreted, and usually tell us more about their authors than about the reality of the Native people they met. She then proceeds to quote and analyze nearly everything that John Lawson, William Byrd II, etc. wrote about why they and their fellow white male travelers did or didn't want to have sex with Native women.
I see why Fischer does this (and why Kathleen Brown and Nancy Shoemaker and lots of other non-Native historians have also done this). But ... we've already acknowledged, very thoroughly, all the ways in which these white male writers were grossly unreliable narrators. If we can do that and then still use their writing as a basis for analysis, would it be that difficult also to use and acknowledge Native historiography and Native historians' work that relies on oral history? Whatever your feelings about the reliability of oral history, it's hard for me to imagine that it could be less trustworthy than Lawson and Byrd.
But that need to distinguish does point out something worth noting here: Suspect Relations isn't hugely original, and I don't think it's trying to be. Kirsten Fischer has taken approaches already created by Brown and other historians and applied them to colonial North Carolina.
Fischer uses court records, particularly slander suits (in which insults were often recorded verbatim) as an important source for the speech and concerns of non-elite, mostly white men and women whose words aren't otherwise recorded. She's interested in what gender, class, and sexual relations had to do with the crystallization of racial identity and hierarchy in the eighteenth century.
This is all standard fare for the sex-race-gender subfield of Anglo-American history of this period. Another reviewer suggested that Suspect Relations would be suitable for the classroom as a more concise version of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs. Probably true! Good Wives, however, (with the caveat that I haven't finished reading it yet!) is a richer work, because Brown was writing about colonial Virginia, which left a wider and fuller range of documents. The colony of North Carolina was much later established, less closely governed, and lacking in the economic resources that enabled Virginia and South Carolina to develop more fully their plantation slavery systems and their wealthy upper class.
So, as Fischer points out at the beginning, the elites of colonial North Carolina were less powerful and in less control over the rest of the colony than their peers elsewhere, and they knew it. This gives colonial North Carolina somewhat different circumstances for developing its own gender, class, and racial relations.
I'm not sure Fischer does quite enough throughout the book to explain what was different or the same about North Carolina and how this related to its poor-cousin status among the British colonies. She does make some relevant comparisons with the results of other historians' work on Virginia and New England. But, as C. Dallett Hemphill noted in a review in The Journal of American History (vol 89.4, March 2003), Fischer sometimes undermines this by directly applying other historians' conclusions (about other colonies with better historical records) to North Carolina.
I would have liked to see more evidence that Fischer was aware of the details of political history. I know that social historians often try to shift attention away from politics and towards the concerns of those who didn't have direct political representation. But in this situation I think political history is a necessary context. I've just read a lot of the higher-court records from the proprietary period (which supply a number of Fischer's examples) and came to the realization that during some periods these records are suspect not only for the standard reason that they were created by elite white men, but also because the higher courts were themselves a site of political conflict. For instance, during the mid-1720s one of the colonial governors, George Burrington, and the chief justice of the General Court, Christopher Gale, were mortal enemies. A lot of cases of slander and assault that came up in the General Court (including some that involve women) are related to Gale's attempts to drive Burrington out of office and then out of the colony. I don't know whether Burrington and his supporters were really as violent and unruly as Gale's supporters painted them in court, but in a book that relies on a deep connection between kyriarchy and attempts to conquer disorder, I think this is useful context.
My other criticism applies to the sex-race-gender subfield in general. The first part of the book deals with gendered and sexual relations between Native people and North Carolina colonists. (Fischer makes a connection here between gender roles and attitudes to land ownership that I think is pretty important.) However, because Native women almost never appeared in colonial North Carolina court records, as white women, and to a lesser extent African American women did, Fischer relies on a different type of primary source -- travel writings, especially John Lawson's A New Voyage to Carolina. She acknowledges of course that these documents, written by white men, are terribly one-sided, have to be carefully interpreted, and usually tell us more about their authors than about the reality of the Native people they met. She then proceeds to quote and analyze nearly everything that John Lawson, William Byrd II, etc. wrote about why they and their fellow white male travelers did or didn't want to have sex with Native women.
I see why Fischer does this (and why Kathleen Brown and Nancy Shoemaker and lots of other non-Native historians have also done this). But ... we've already acknowledged, very thoroughly, all the ways in which these white male writers were grossly unreliable narrators. If we can do that and then still use their writing as a basis for analysis, would it be that difficult also to use and acknowledge Native historiography and Native historians' work that relies on oral history? Whatever your feelings about the reliability of oral history, it's hard for me to imagine that it could be less trustworthy than Lawson and Byrd.
April 26, 2021
An evocative, at times horrific, display of colonial societies pertaining to the rights of women and slaves and the creation of race and gender as well as the intersectionality of the above. Additionally, an interesting look at the inextricably linked economics of colonial societies.
July 28, 2011
This is a great piece of history, focusing on everyone else in in NC, not just the rich white men who usually dictate what is important. There are strong women, sassy native americans, proud blacks, and all sorts of other interesting individuals that will challenge the usual paradigm of colonial history. The author uses case studies and historical examples to show that history, especially when it involves sex, was NEVER as pure and upstanding as traditionalists would have you believe. A joy to read.
March 18, 2008
Like Brown's Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, this book looks at the construction of race as a category in colonial America (focus on North Carolina). However, this is a more concise book and would work better in the classroom.
Read
November 4, 2017Interesting read for history class (sex sexuality and gender in America until 1880). Helped with understanding of how race was constructed in the south along with gender&sexuality.
Seems that race was just constructed because it was convenient for white people/helped them accomplish their goals. So frustrating that it is so arbitrary. Why did it need to happen?? Such horrible consequences...
Seems that race was just constructed because it was convenient for white people/helped them accomplish their goals. So frustrating that it is so arbitrary. Why did it need to happen?? Such horrible consequences...
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews