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,