Contract rights in the Age of Emancipation: Wage labor and marriage after the Civil War

This dissertation studies ideas and relations of contract in late nineteenth-century America. It illuminates how in the aftermath of slave emancipation contract captured the public imagination as the embodiment of freedom. It focuses on the wage-labor contract and the marriage contract. It reveals the dependency and domination that persisted within ostensibly free wage contracts, and it also brings to light the anomalies of the marriage bond in a society rhetorically committed to contract principles of self sovereignty and unfettered exchange. It documents how commodity forms of social exchange not only governed in industrial employment but also impinged on family economy and the obligations of husband and wife.;Chapter One establishes the equation of freedom with contract in postbellum social thought and traces the genesis of modern contract doctrine from its seventeenth century origins. Chapters Two and Three focus on the wage contract, the conflict it engendered, and the relations of authority and dependency embedded in this free market transaction. Chapters Four and Five illuminate the implications of men's dependence on the wage contract for the paternal bonds of marriage, focusing especially on the wife's wage work, her legal rights to her earnings, and the contradiction between contract rights and the rules of marriage.