Stanley, Amy Dru. From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Summary
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. The arguments of each were grounded in the changing circumstances of labor and home life on both sides of the Mason-Dixie line. She argues that at the heart of these arguments lay the problem to define which '''realms of self and social existence could be rendered market commodities''' and which could not. She argues that the problem of distinguishing between the two reflected the ideological and social changes wrought by the concurrence of abolition in the South and the burgeoning of industrial capitalism in the North. They drew on contract to describe the changes in their world and to distinguish between the commodity relations of freedom and bondage. Stanley places marriage and home life alongside labor, revealing the ambiguities and contractions of contract/wage-labor, from a woman’s right to own herself to beggars outside of contracts. Contract ideology provided a worldview and common language for a range of social and political debates after Emancipation, and its tensions were highlighted as people tried to figure out where marriage, beggars, prostitutes, and ex-slaves fit within this framework. The antislavery idea of contract distinguished between freedom and bondage, but efforts by postbellum Americans to draw boundaries between the sale of labor and the sale of sex in the free marketplace reveals how the moral legitimacy of commodity relations rested on establishing such boundaries. “Though shaped by liberal contract theory that idealized propertied individualism and voluntary exchange, abolitionism altered that theory by making home life, together with labor, central to the conflict over slavery and freedom.”

Example: Prostitution; The abolitionist argument was a juxtaposition of slavery and domesticity; slavery disrupted natural sex relations. “Dishonored, stripped bare, the bondswoman literally embodied the denial of property in the self, which for abolitionists counted as the ultimate wrong.” Marriage and wives thus became central to the slavery debate; this opened up (later chapters) to question the right of women to own themselves.

See also: Jeanne Boydston, David Roedegger, Stuart Blumin, Thomas Bender, Scott Sandage,