RCC Lifelong Learning looks at Colonial-period women
The Rappahannock Community College Educational Foundation’s Rappahannock Institute for Lifelong Learning (RILL) will soon present a course on “Women in Colonial Virginia.” Instructor Robert Teagle will lead the three sessions on May 2, 9 and 16, from 1 to 3 p.m., at Historic Christ Church in Weems (Lancaster County).
This course examines the lives of Powhatan Indian, English, and African women in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Virginia, and explores the ways gender, race, and ethnicity intersected to shape women’s roles. Topics include law, sex, marriage, property, work, family, children, speech, and entrepreneurship, among others.
Participants will learn how immigration, unbalanced sex ratios, a dispersed population, high mortality rates, servitude and slavery, and English efforts to create a patriarchal society influenced women as Virginia moved from the status of a colony to that of a new commonwealth.
Robert Teagle is the education director and curator of the Foundation for Historic Christ Church. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the College of William & Mary and a master’s degree in American history from Virginia Tech. His research and teaching interests focus on the history of colonial Virginia, including its architecture, the role of the Church of England, and the Carter family.
Advance registration, with a tuition payment of $35, is required to take this course. For more information on “Women in Colonial Virginia” and other RILL courses, or to register, please call Sharon Drotleff at RCC’s Educational Foundation office (804-333-6707), or e-mail her at sdrotleff@rappahannock.edu.
The Educational Foundation expresses sincere appreciation to the Virginia Commonwealth Bank’s Golden Advantage program, and to Rappahannock Westminster-Canterbury, for their generous support of RILL in 2018.
