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“I Maintained My Authority:” Gender and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Virginia Home
Cross-Kaplan, Maddie
Cross-Kaplan, Maddie
Abstract
This thesis examines William Byrd II and Lucy Parke Byrd alongside John Custis IV and Frances Parke Custis as significant players in the early Virginia landscape. I base the bulk of my work on William Byrd II’s diaries, John Custis IV and Frances Parke Custis’s Marriage Agreement, and the homes of these two men. Where I do not have Lucy and Frances’s voices, I am reliant on the words of their husbands – what they did say, and at times, what they omitted. Without a clear image of the Byrds’ and Custis’ world, Lucy and Frances might appear an insignificant, but unwelcome burden to these men. The object of William Byrd and John Custis’s world was to “maintain authority;” when we reconsider what it means to succeed in that effort and examine the impact these men’s wives had on their success as patriarchs, it becomes clear that these men were only nominally successful. As the authors of surviving written documents, they get the last word, but the voices of women like Lucy Parke Byrd and Frances Parke Custis are still incredibly clear within them.
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2023-04-01
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4/30/2030
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History