In the 1970s, two debates engaged many scholars of early
United States history. One focused on the status of women,
primarily White women. Turning on the so-called golden age
theory, which posited that during the eighteenth-century colonial
era, American women enjoyed a brief period of high status relative
to their English contemporaries and to nineteenth-century American
women, this debate pitted scholars who believed women’s lives
deteriorated after 1800 against those who thought women’s lives
had been no better before 1800. At issue were the causes of
women’s subordination: were these causes already in place when
the English first settled North America or did they emerge with the
rise of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism? The second debate,
the so-called origins debate, concerned the emergence of racial
slavery in the southern colonies: was slavery the inevitable result
of the deep-rooted racial prejudice of early British colonists or did
racial prejudice arise only after these planters instituted slave labor?
Although these debates are parallel in some respects, key
differences distinguished them. Whereas the debate over women’s
status revolved around implicit comparisons of colonial women to
their counterparts in the antebellum period (1800-1860), thus
inviting comment from scholars of both historical periods, the
origins debate was primarily confined to a discussion about slavery
in colonial America. Second, in contrast to the newness of the
debate over women’s status and its continued currency throughout
the early 1980s, the debate over race and slavery, begun in the
1950s, had lost some of its urgency with the publication of
Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), widely
regarded as the last word on the subject.
Each debate also assumed a different relationship to the groups
whose histories it concerned. In its heyday, the origins debate
focused mainly on White attitudes toward Africans rather than on
Africans themselves. With few exceptions, such as Wood’s Black
Majority (1974) and Mullin’s Flight and Rebellion (1972), which
were centrally concerned with enslaved African men, most works
pertaining to the origins debate focused on the White architects,
mostly male, of racial slavery. In contrast, although women’s
historians were interested in the institutions and ideologies
contributing to women’s subordination, they were equally
concerned with documenting women’s experiences. As in the
origins debate, however, early scholarship on colonial women
defined its historical constituency narrowly, women’s historians
focusing mainly on affluent White women.
Over time, however, some initial differences between the
approaches taken by scholars in the two fields faded. In the 1980s,
historians of race and slavery in colonial America shifted their
attention to enslaved people; interest in African American culture
grew, thereby bringing enslaved women more prominently into
view. Historians of early American women moved in similar
directions during the decade and began to consider the effect of
racial difference on women’s experience.