Freedom and Families: Reconstruction Republicans and the Question of Women's Reproductive Autonomy

This Essay proceeds in three Parts. In the first, I illuminate how congressional Republicans discussed women, gender, and families in the context of policymaking associated with abolishing slavery. Many Republicans worried that enslaved people’s family relationships had been damaged by the imposition of slavery and sought to impose on freedpeople what they saw as normative family values, including by encouraging heterosexual marriage and by insisting on patriarchal gender roles within families. Second, I show that Republicans were at pains to demonstrate that when they talked about equality, they meant race but not gender. Finally, I reflect on the limits of relying on elite discourse for understanding the past and discuss synergies between the work of some constitutional law scholars and that of historians working to deepen our collective understanding of the history of women, gender, and families in the nineteenth-century United States. This abstract has been taken from the author's introduction.