Marriage as Slavery: Oroonoko, the Slave Trade, and the Origins of English Feminism

Abstract This article investigates Mary Astell’s controversial comparison of marriage to slavery. While existing scholarship situates this analogy within the neo-Roman republican framework, which defined slavery as subjection to absolute rule, I investigate another paradigm: the transatlantic slave trade. To make this case, the article traces the influence of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) on early feminist thought. By foregrounding the market logic underpinning chattel slavery, Behn popularized the idea that slavery’s harms were rooted, not in absolute power, but in the commodification of human beings. Astell appropriated this insight, showing that marriage resembled slavery not because husbands wielded power over wives but because the institution had been commodified: women were treated as things to be bought and sold. In uncovering this genealogy of feminist thought, the article highlights the enduring contributions of the “first” English feminists—insights that are entangled with, and shaped by, the development of the slave trade.