Wives Not Slaves

The final two chapters return to the relationship between marriage and slavery as it played out in households and in the law in the decades before and after the American Revolution, 1760 – 1800. Chapter Seven explores multiple, contradictory late eighteenth-century forms of the argument that wives were not slaves. The argument could be used to defend the prerogatives of white women or conversely to challenge the enslavement of women of color. During the 1760s, the argument flagged cases in which white women’s equitable “rights” were redefined as novel “privileges.” White women defined their status against other dependents, especially when the power of wealth failed to mediate the disabilities of gender. While women recognized that they shared grievances across the color line, they did not share common interests. The chapter draws on feminist writers Margaret Cavendish and Frances Brooke, and on cases from across the colonies, including an instance of domestic “tyranny” involving feminist founder Abigail Adams and her mother-in-law Elizabeth. Freedom suits in which people of color set the possessory rights of husbands against those of masters points to an orchestrated effort to challenge slavery by any possible means, using political arguments and alliances that were not conventionally “revolutionary.”

Argument (complex analysis) · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Race (biology) · Sociology · White (mutation) · Women of color · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Law