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From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation
This book explores how a generation of American thinkers and reformers - abolitionists, former slaves, feminists, labor advocates, jurists, moralists, and social scientists - drew on contract to condemn the evils of chattel slavery as well as to measure the virtues of free society. Their arguments over the meaning of slavery and freedom were grounded in changing circumstan...more
Paperback, 294 pages
Published
November 13th 1998
by Cambridge University Press
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This is an incredibly thoughtful and thought-provoking study of how wage contracts displaced the social contract in American life. Contracts, at least ideally, represented choice and mutual benefit. The embrace of contract labor in the years around abolition separated labor and dependency—historically paired in the American imagination. However, while these arguments added to the case against slavery, they complicated the position of wage laborers and women in the rapidly expanding market econom...more
The industrial age brought to the fore the issues of wage contracts, slavery and the marriage contract. This book is, for the most part, a labor history text. However, it is also a feminist history text because it discusses marriage and the 'coverture' of a woman's assets in marriages of the time. Essentially, one can equate marriage with slavery, especially before the modern era. The last chapter is called "The Purchase of Women" and deals with prostitution.
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