When Congress debated the meaning of slave emancipation the galleries overhead were filled with women. There they would have heard statesmen equate freedom with contract but also affirm that abolition did not transform the bonds of marriage – that “A husband has a right of property in the service of his wife.” One of those listening in the congressional gallery was Frances Gage. Reflecting on the debate, she observed: “I would not say one word against marriage.… But let it be a marriage of equality. Let the man and woman stand as equals before the law.” That aspiration was central to antislavery feminism in the nineteenth century.

In the wake of emancipation it fell not to Congress but to state lawmakers to reconcile the traditional rules of marriage with the new circumstances of wage work, which increasingly rendered wives’ labor a commodity for sale on the market. The core of the problem was a wife's right to her own labor, wages, and person – a property right that the wage contract presumed but the marriage contract denied. Legislatures throughout the country responded by enacting “earnings laws” that entitled wives to the fruits of their waged labor, thereby seeming to address feminist claims about the anomalies of marriage in free society. Here was a set of rights that appeared to replicate the contract rights afforded to former slaves. Yet the analogy was not so clear-cut, for the reforms did not nullify a husband's legal title to his wife's service at home.