For William Byrd II, gendered violence was part of the daily routine. Born to wealth in 1674, Byrd owned thousands of acres in Virginia and oversaw dozens of people who made his estate profitable.
He maintained a secret diary in which he recorded how gender and violence intersected in his life. His wife Lucy was an obvious target, and Byrd noted how he often ‘gave [his] wife a flourish'.
Lucy's consent for sex was unnecessary; when a recent pregnancy left her ‘much indisposed', the sexual encounter continued anyway, even though Lucy ‘took but little pleasure' from it. Byrd's power over women extended beyond his marriage. On one occasion he used his position as a wealthy landowner to force a servant girl to ‘feel [his] roger', or penis. He was also notorious for his harsh discipline of African American slaves, and violence framed how he interacted with women of colour. In his diaries he describes lusting after a Native American woman (‘a dark angel') and the time he ‘asked a negro girl to kiss' him.1William Byrd is indicative of the characteristics of gender and violence in early America. While marital discord and abuse were not confined to the colonies, their exploitative economy and mixture of diverse peoples encouraged and expanded male power over women, often in violent ways. Beginning with the arrival of Columbus in 1492, the European conquest of America was built upon the sexual mistreatment of indigenous women, and the racialisation of gendered violence remained a constant throughout early America, growing more acute when African American slavery became the dominant form of labour. As was the case with William Byrd, gendered violence towards women often began in the home. Colonial governments bestowed significant legal authority on the heads of households, effectively [413] mandating that men use violence to discipline their female dependants. The expansion of patriarchal privilege concealed rape and prohibited battered wives from escaping their abusers.
But if the history of early America is one of gendered violence, it is also one of revolution.
Women, including Native Americans and African Americans, repeatedly fought back against their abusers, even when the consequences were fatal. Moreover, the variety of colonial governments allowed for alternative household orders to flourish, such as in Pennsylvania where abusive husbands were punished effectively. The Enlightenment reframed the behaviour of men like William Byrd as sexual tyranny such that eighteenth-century sensibilities turned against unchecked male privilege. Following the Revolution, governments enabled legal recourses for abused women through rape prosecutions and divorce. However, these protections only extended to white women, further racialising gendered violence in the nation that followed.The intersection of gender and violence thus lies at the heart of American history, from contact to the creation of the United States. It was pervasive and expansive, implicit and explicit, with unique characteristics shaped by the colonial economy and notions of race. Most of all, it was a crucible in which modern American notions of gender and violence were forged. While few colonial Americans were surprised by the actions of William Byrd, it was because of changes in the eighteenth century that we are repulsed by his behaviour three centuries later.