This book explores the changing meaning and enduring implications of the woman-slave analogy across the many social movements of the long nineteenth century. The analogy between woman and slave is regarded as one of the most significant yet controversial rhetorical strategies in the history of feminism. Looking beyond its foundations in the antislavery and women’s rights movements, this book examines the influence of this rhetoric in popular culture as well as its varied consequences across the dress reform, labor, suffrage, free love, racial uplift, and anti-vice movements. At once provocative and commonplace, the woman-slave analogy was used to exceptionally varied ends in the era of slave emancipation. Yet, as this book reveals, a far more diverse assembly of reformers both accepted and embraced a woman as slave worldview than has previously been appreciated. The woman-slave analogy existed at the heart of nineteenth-century women’s rights discourse and continues to underpin many of the debates that shape feminist theory today. weiterlesen