Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Domestication of Free Labor Ideology

Abstract

Through much of her voluminous writing, Harriet Beecher Stowe expressed her concern with the subject of work—its structure, its moral imperative, its regional variations, and its impact on family life. Her utopian vision of a free and democratic labor system informed her critique of slavery and shaped her analysis of the "woman's sphere." This essay foregrounds Stowe's central preoccupation with the labor questions of her own day and, in so doing, engages a tradition of feminist literary scholarship that invests Stowe's work with anti-commercial meanings. Rather than a subversive critic of the marketplace, Stowe was a substantial contributor to the intellectual history of American liberalism. 1

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