In 1981, while teaching “Ages of Man” to 9th graders at an all-girls high school, Kathleen Brown noted the irony. 

Brown, now a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, says that at the time she felt poorly equipped to redesign the course, which focused on political, military and economic history from a global perspective. After two years of grappling with the lack of women’s history in the curriculum, she headed to graduate school to focus more on women’s history and became interested in the history of race and slavery. 

“I wanted to find a way to write about gender, race and slavery together that might help gender historians to rethink their approach to the history of women,” says Brown, “but at the same time, I wanted historians of race and slavery to bring gender more prominently into their analyses.” 

Her first book, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs, did just that. It tracked the colony of Virginia’s legal efforts to define and regulate gender, sexuality and racial differences, efforts that emerged from dealing with agricultural labor and childbearing among servant and enslaved women. In it, she proposes that racism took root because it was instilled early in life, in the daily household routines and the ways in which ordinary people navigated through the colonial world. 

“I demonstrated that racism cannot simply take hold and become part of the political economy, unless people are taught to believe in the racial inferiority of a subordinated group in some very profound and primal way,” Brown says. 

In her work, Brown challenges the American history narrative, helping to incorporate gender perspectives on how American historians think about race and slavery. Her second book, Foul Bodies, tracked historical change even in the most intimate spaces, including the household and the care of the human body. 

Most of her recent research reimagines the dynamics of historical change by highlighting how the role of gender does not fit easily into the current models. Brown says it is often difficult for people to imagine social change that comes from numerous dispersed sites, like individual households. 

“Historians remain very limited in how we comprehend historical causation,” Brown says. “We seem unable to relinquish our unacknowledged dependence upon physical science models of causation in which a central disturbance, like a pebble dropped in the water, creates ripples of energy that move outward.”

However, she contends, public debates, spaces, spheres, the economy and politics of the time were not the only sources of change and this model is too simple. 

“It is an insufficient model for explaining why people’s mundane lives and their relationships to politics and the economy have undergone such dramatic changes in the last four centuries,” Brown says. “Gender must be a component of any new narrative if we are to make our way through the political challenges of race, class and intimacy inequalities.” 

Brown is currently on sabbatical working on a forthcoming book, Undoing Slavery. In it, she ties it all together, returning to her origins as a high school history teacher and prompting further questions about gender, race and slavery. But this time, she’s looking at it exclusively through an abolitionist lens. 

In Undoing Slavery, Brown hopes to reveal how the consensus to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade did nothing to end American slavery or slow the forced removal of indigenous people from their homelands. She will illustrate how Christian activists used highly gendered appeals to persuade white audiences to support abolition, despite their radical religious beliefs that historically downplayed the relevance of gender. 

Brown is interested in exploring possible inconsistencies in abolitionist views on the institution of marriage, such as the absence of protections for slave marriages. She is also interested in the unusual number of abolitionists who became health-care providers for African-Americans, noting how medical knowledge became a central priority for those who dedicated their lives to gaining freedom for slaves. 

Brown’s research for Undoing Slavery, includes examining primary sources from the Quaker collections at Haverford College, document collections at the state library in Richmond, Va., and at the College of William & Mary and abolition papers at the University of Michigan’s Clements Library. This summer, her continuing research will take her to London and to the Mitchell Library in Sydney. 

Brown hopes her work will unveil how marriage emerged as a key institution for gaining people the privileges of citizenship and full adult humanity, a topic that’s still relevant today in the area of marriage equality. 

“I want people to approach the issues of the past, like slave labor, motherhood and abolition, as having a material reality rooted in the human body. Historical subjects did not simply make cerebral arguments against slavery,” Brown says. “Rather, slavery made them think about and with their bodies as they contemplated a world without coerced labor.” 

Undoing Slavery is scheduled for publication in late 2017.