Virginia Law Taxes African Women as Field Laborers (1643)

Virginia's colonial assembly in 1643 classified African women as 'tithables' — taxable field laborers — while exempting English women from this classification. This distinction encoded racial difference into tax law, marking Black women as presumptively agricultural laborers regardless of their actual role. The law was an early step in constructing race-based legal categories that would underpin chattel slavery, treating Black women's bodies and labor as categorically different from and lesser than white women's.