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IN December 1771, a young Virginia girl, probably eleven-year-old Sally Fairfax of Towlston in Fairfax County, wrote brief diary entries about holiday visits and family pastimes on a Tidewater plantation. Three days after Christmas she recorded in her usual terse style that she "won 10 shillings of Mr William payn at Chex." Chex, or checks, we know from another diary from the same period, was a game girls played with peach stones.1 The event apparently constituted the high point of her day, because she wrote about nothing else in that entry. She occasionally addressed her text to her "dear reader," a clear indication that she expected to have an audience who would take note of her accomplishments. On 28 December, she wanted her reader to recall that she won a small sum playing chex with a grown man. This incident, and minor ones like it, demonstrate the ways that women and even girls enjoyed the competitive world of elite Virginia society and how they wanted their small victories remembered.
Gaming and gambling rituals have allowed anthropologists and historians alike to understand the values and assumptions people held in the past. Twenty years ago, anthropologist Clifford Geertz saw such rituals not merely as reflective of society but also as "positive agents in the creation and maintenance" of cultural sensibilities. Since then, historians have borrowed anthropological and microhistorical approaches to understand how activities, including competitive gaming, signaled certain cultural expectations in particular periods.2 Through gambling, women could compete with men and therefore subtly challenge boundaries of social expectations concerning gender. Disguised behind poker faces, women could rewrite the scripts in the performance of gender roles, if only in the temporary and controlled situations of after-dinner whist games.
Historian T. H. Breen has drawn on Geertz's insights to conclude that by placing their personal honor at stake in wagers, men in colonial Virginia asserted their social and economic rank. Gambling enabled male members of the gentry to channel their competitive, individualistic, and materialistic cultural values in a nonviolent way that also allowed them to assert their dominance over lower-class whites.3 In a similar vein, Rhys Isaac argued that in the eighteenth-century Tidewater region, colonists understood gambling as alternately thrilling and dangerous. It provided a means for the winner...