Changes

In ''Genealogical Fictions'', Martínez charts the rise of racial categories in Spain's colonies. Martínez details the origin of this system in the Iberian peninsula, then charts the transformations and problems that emerge when this system is imposed onto a diverse and distant population. One of the central pillars of this book is the focus on gender and sexuality. As a system concerned with biological reproduction, female sexuality was central to determining legitimacy, hierarchy, and purity. But Martínez goes even further to detail how gendered descriptions were fixed to colonized peoples--ultimately cementing their fixed positions in the Spanish racial hierarchy.

[[File:Good_Wives.jpg|thumbnail|left|200px|[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807846236/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0807846236&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=9e26aecaa275dd4059382ba0a2772904 Good Wives, Nasty Wenches & Anxious Patriarchs]]]

This book is, in many ways, a challenge to Edmund Morgan's ''American Slavery, American Freedom''. In it, Brown argues that gender became a category of difference before race really entered American colonists' vocabulary. Beginning, of all things, with colonial tax law, Brown argues that the way that Virginia colonists perceived African and black women differently from English women helped to create a system of racial difference that ultimately led to racial slavery. A must read.

In ''Rape and Sexual Power in Early America'', Sharon Block provides a comprehensive analysis of rape accusations and prosecutions from approximately 1700-1820. Block examined more than 900 documented incidents of "sexual coercion" to illustrate the dynamics of sexual power in play in British North America. According to Block, definitions of rape or assault were more frequently based on the identities of the parties involved. Through her analysis of these documents, Block argues that the way official persecuted these infractions worked to preserve the social, racial, gender, and political hierarchies of early North America.

In this fascinating book, Lyons centers her analysis on the sexual practices of "the rabble," and explores the limits of freedom and individualism. Like Block, Lyons argues that sex and gender were crucial to reconstituting social hierarchies.

In this book, Jennifer Morgan focuses her attention on slave women and their bodies from the 1640s to the 1750s, approximately. Specifically, Morgan is concerned with slave women's statuses as producers (i.e. laborers), and reproducers (biological). She explores several different slave systems in the Atlantic world to piece together an interesting analysis of how slave traders and slave owners viewed slave women, and how slave women negotiated their own existence as well.

8. Carol Berkin, ''[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400075327/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1400075327&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=0d206ae11e640b030bbae88b1633628a Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence]'', (Vintage, 2006).

In this book, Bárbara Reyes explores what life was like for women in Spanish California. Reyes looks, first, at the creation of the missions in California then moves to analyze three three different women and their experiences from the late 18th century to the early 19th century: an Indian woman accused of murdering a priest, a Spanish woman who accuses her husband of adultery, and a Mestiza woman who became the ''lavera'' or head housekeeper at the San Gabriel Mission.

In this book, Marisa Fuentes takes us to Bridgetown, Barbados where she takes us through the lives of women--enslaved an free--who would otherwise be invisible in the historical record. Using interdisciplinary methods, pieces together a narrative from fragmentary sources and also looks at the archives themselves and how they mark women's bodies.