This was a book I picked up for research purposes and I didn’t actually read all of it, only the chapters relevant to what I was writing about, but it’s a very interesting piece of historical writing (intended more for the scholar than the general reader, but not entirely inaccessible to general readers). Essentially, it’s about how the roles of white and Black women in colonial Virginia became more clearly defined as English settlement and African slavery there became more entrenched, and how it was in the interest of the white male men who ruled the colony — those “anxious” patriarchs” to define white and Black versions of feminine experience almost in opposition to each other, so that neither could be an effective threat to the power of white, Christian, English men.