From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation

by Amy Dru Stanley

This book explores the centrality of contract to debates over freedom and slavery in nineteenth-century America. It focuses on the contracts of wage labor and marriage, investigating the connections between abolition in the South and industrial capitalism in the North and linking labor relations to home life. Integrating the fields of gender and legal, intellectual and social history, it reveals how abolitionists, former slaves, feminists, laborers, lawmakers and others drew on contract to condemn chattel slavery and to measure the virtues of free society.

Genres: History, American History, Labor, Nonfiction, 19th Century, Womens Studies

294 pages, Hardcover

First published November 13, 1998

Reviews

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an odd book but very interesting. The shift towards contract labor after emancipation is linked to late nineteenth century conception of marriage, as well as people seen outside of typical contract relations (primarily beggars and prostitutes), through the evolving ideas of personhood linked to liberal contract ideology. I think the argument could be made somewhat broader but as is still produces a worthwhile text

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The long first two chapters, which are more dominated by the voices of American political economists, lack the incisiveness and even drama of the latter chapters, which are told more through the voices of reformers. Among those reformers are some of the great 19th century feminists, and Stanley's writing always reaches a higher gear when she is explicating their writings.

It is therefore a great loss that the book cuts off abruptly without quite reaching any convincing historical endpoint. Stanley provocatively contrasts the Mann and Clayton Acts of the 1910s as signaling a kind of permanent narrowing of wider social anxieties about wage labor onto the single question of sex work: where once wage labor itself was still being debated as a potentially unconscionable act of selling one's person, now only the selling of sex was thought to breach the moral perimeter which distinguished commodities from persons. Yet Stanley simply leaps ahead to these Acts from a kind of nebulous place in the 1870s and 1880s. It would have been a much richer book, I think, if she could have filled in the space between.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant exposition of the intersection of labor, intellectual history, and civil rights movements in early America. Stanley's writing is lucid, concise, and a pleasure to read.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book blew my mind.

[farheen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Booooooooooo boring

[coleen]

*not rating books i read for classes*

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 economy. Stanley’s text problematizes the wage and marriage contract by examining the social role of the beggar and prostitute, who operated outside the contract system, in addition to those men and women who ‘successfully’ navigated contracts.

I found Stanley's discussion of marriage contracts, which create a relationship of status, and the early feminist efforts to reshape the marital relationship especially fascinating.

The text is fantastically written. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in gender, labor, and race in the US. The text focuses on the period immediately after the Civil War, but her insights illuminate the 20th century as well.