| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Barbara Ryan. Love, Wages, Slavery: The Literature of Servitude in the United States. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2006. Pp. 246. $40.00.
At the heart of Barbara Ryan's book is a series of crucial observations about the assumptions of the nineteenth-century world. What she reveals is the ubiquity of a sentimental ideal of servitude, even in the years when antisentimentality (and postsentimentality) were in the ascendant. This was, fundamentally, because writers never truly defined what it meant to be "family-like" even as they insisted that this was the acme of success for non-kin workers.	1
"Indeed," Ryan writes, "ambiguity was crucial to the widespread and long-lived appeal of the idea that nonkin service should be family-like" (p. 20).	2
Additionally, and perhaps even more crucially, Ryan identifies meaningful links between slavery and "free" service from the antebellum period to the Gilded Age. In her epilogue she argues that despite the vibrant new scholarship on service, "downplayed in this body of research ... is recognition of the extent to which and the ways in which ideas about slavery shaped ideas about service of disparate kinds as well as mastery and mistress-ship as such things related to home and 'family' life" (p. 185). This book is a contribution precisely because it does just what she calls for.	. . .

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