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Drawing on the studies of women’s history in Early America and on the research into play and entertainment in the British North American colonies, the present article discusses the functions of leisure practices in constructing femininity and shaping the patriarchal gender relations among the gentry of eighteenth-century Virginia. In the colonial South it was the elaborate pattern of hospitality and entertainment that produced social space within which young women from the elite were prepared for their future social roles. Male domination was performed in symbolically rich leisure rituals, where both the social roles that men and women played and the objects they used in elaborate practices of public consumption and display of wealth signified the established social order. Women’s history is a well-established research area in the studies of Early America. The first studies devoted to the lives of colonial women were published as early as at the beginning of the 20th century, coinciding with the first wave of feminism. Alice Morse Earle’s Colonial Dames and Good Wives and Elizabeth Dexter’s Colonial Women of Affairs: Women in Business and the Professions in America before 1776 were the first attempts to present women as important figures in the history of colonial America. Julia Cherry Spruill in Woman’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies offers a pioneering attempt to characterize Southern women as a social group. The early studies, while challenging the dominant vision of history as an account of male accomplishments, mostly analyse the daily lives of white, upper class women2.

The Leisure Pursuits of Gentlewomen in Colonial Virginia: Gender Construction and Male Domination