Personal Property: Wives, White Slaves, and the Market in Women

In Personal Property, Margit Stange analyzes white slavery literature in relation to other key American writings of the time by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Jane Addams, and Kate Chopin. The anthropological theory of the exchange of women developed by nineteenth-century anthropologists—in whose view, as Thorstein Veblen put it, woman is the original private property—informs white slavery depictions of racialized, enslaved female bodies. Similarly, Stange argues, this theory is r...