Summary Of Babbling Women

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Around seven years after Brown’s phenomenal work, Terri L. Snyder released Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and Law in Early Virginia. To advance the image of women in early Virginia, this book is an early examination of colonial Virginians attitudes towards women’s speech and how men viewed this speech as undesirable. The title of the book is taken from a 1662 Virginia law passed by the General Assembly that stipulated that “brabbling signified a wrangling, quibbling, quarrelsome, or riotous disposition.” This law turned an otherwise un-gendered type of speech into a gendered style of conversation, which recognized the speech of disorderly women as a key factor in the mayhem in the colony in addition to Bacon’s Rebellion. According to Snyder,