You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 137 words from this article are provided below; about 381 words remain.
 		 
If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:
• login here if you have already registered for online access.
• Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.

If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:
• Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.

Instititutions can:
•  Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.
| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative
94.1  
Journals link Search link Partners link Information link
June, 2007
Previous
Next
The Journal of American History

Table of Contents
List journal issues
Home
Get a printer-friendly version of this page
 


Book Review


Love, Wages, Slavery: The Literature of Servitude in the United States. By Barbara Ryan. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 246 pp. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03071-0.)
Barbara Ryan's fascinating book explores a nineteenth-century American conundrum that still bedevils us: must a well-kept home depend on free (unpaid) labor? Or can it incorporate paid domestics who are free to leave? As Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in an 1839 story, "Shall we go for slavery, or shall we give up houses?" (p. 5). Ryan links that anxiety with Henry David Thoreau's Walden experiment, as well as with Brook Farm and Fruitlands, as she explores public and private writings about "nonkin" service in fiction, letters, diaries, magazine articles, slave narratives, "servants' tales," home economics treatises, and labor surveys, before, during, and well after slave emancipation (p. 2). . . .
There are about 381 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.