How did lifetime enslavement and white male domination impact gender during the colonial and early national periods of U.S. history?

Slavery existed for a relatively short time in the northern colonies. It was abolished, state-by-state, by the early-nineteenth century (New Jersey was among the last to abolish it in 1804) due to a relative lack of agrarian culture compared with that of the South. Nevertheless, northern textile mills would indirectly depend on slave labor for cotton supplies.

In the South, until the late-seventeenth century, slaves had certain rights that became unthinkable by the eighteenth-century. In Virginia, which would become a very wealthy slave-holding state, slaves were allowed to maintain small plots of land on which they could grow their own crops and sell them. They were also allowed to move relatively freely, and sometimes had the option of buying their own freedom. 

The increasing profitability of cash crops, such as tobacco in Virginia and, after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, cotton and rice crops in the Deep South, led to stricter guidelines for enslavement, more deeply entrenching black people into a system of bondage. A color-line had developed: to be white meant to be free, and to be black meant to be a slave. It is around this time, too, that we see the rise of a planter class. Though few white men belonged to this exclusive category, others aspired to it and made livings off of it, as overseers, for example.

The planter class in the South was a hierarchy based on a Classical model. Southerners envisioned their mode of civilization as a successor to those of Ancient Greece and Rome, also slave-holding societies. In those societies, too, men were dominant and had sexual access to their slaves.

It is well-known that many Southern slave-holders, including the illustrious Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun, had sexual relationships with at least one of their slaves. The ownership of black women, as well as slaves' absolute lack of legal recourse, allowed for consistent rape (by both planters and overseers), concubinage, and forced breeding. The commodification of human bodies inevitably extended to sexuality and reproduction. Thus, the slave system allowed for the absolute economic, political, and sexual hegemony of white men. Because white women were not allowed to own their own property, but were merely married off with dowries (e.g., small sums of money, slaves), they did not have much agency in this system.

Concubinage -- that is, taking another woman or multiple women of lower status than one's wife as sexual partners -- often led to jealousy and resentment on the part of the planters' wives. To legitimize the infidelities and to discourage any similar behavior from their wives, white Southern patriarchy recreated the white woman as an emblem of femininity: chaste, noble, and true. This image particularly applied to upper-class Southern ladies. 

While black women became defined by their sexual and reproductive beings, many upper-class white women -- intent on living up to male standards of femininity -- became distant from these aspects of themselves. Neurasthenia, a vague medical condition defined by fatigue, headache, and irritability, was rather common in the early-nineteenth century, as were "the vapors," a similar disease to neurasthenia, though this one caused hysteria, mood swings, and depression. Both were said to have been caused by emotional disturbance and tended to impact women more than men. There is a possible connection between these conditions and the very repressed lives white women led in patriarchal societies.