Legal history and intellectual history 41 pie; and the state should not be involved in determining how the pie is divided and distributed. Those convictions, not a desire to protect their own class interests, best explain the content of the statutes and judicial opinions they produced and the terminology in which those edicts were expressecf.-'’^ A more nuanced and multi-dimensional application of the same methodology undergirds Reva Siegel’s essay, “Home as Work.”5’ The principal object of her study is the unsuccessful effort by a group of antebellum feminists to persuade state legislatures to accord legal recognition to wives’ domestic labor by according them legal rights tc') a portion of the marital assets to which their husbands had title. Siegel argues persuasively that three social and intellectual traditions provided these feminists the rhetorical resources to wage their campaign: utopian communitarianism (in particular, the conceptions of gender equality and material feminismthat figured in many of the antebellumutopian experiments); abolitionism(in particular, the free labor ideology and the principle of self-ownership developed and popularized by some segments of the abolitionist movement); and the “cult of domesticity” (in particular, the conception of women’s responsibility for the spiritual welfare of their husbands, children and, by extension, whole society and the associated proposition that a mother’s work in the private sphere is as socially valuable as a father’s economic or political work in the public sphere). The feminists’ invocation of each of these languages and attitudes was partially (but only partially) transformative; to advance their cause they drew upon (and, to some degree, mc^dified) the more egalitarian or liberatory components of each belief-system, but their inability to free themselves altogether fromthe more conservative dimensions of those discourses largely accounts for the limitations of their movement and its ultimate failure. In short, Siegel deploys effectively (albeit apparently unconsciously) all of the features of the contextualist method; an intense historicism;5- painstaking excavation of the concepts and assumptions that shaped the discourse of a particular community; and careful exploration of the respects in which the members of that community depended upon or were able partially to transcend the languages and beliefs of other, contemporaneous discursive communities. For an earlier essav using the same methodology to reach similar conclusions concerning the foundations of antitrust law, see James May, “Antitrust in the Formative Era: Political and Economic Theory in Constitutional and Antitrust Analysis, 1880-1918,” Ohio State LazeJournal 50 (1989): 257. Reva Siegel, “Homeas Work: The First Woman’s Rights Claims Concerning Wives’ Household Labor, 1850-1880,” Yale LazeJournal 103 (1994): 1073-1217. ”While questions of contemporary theoretical interest shape this inquiry, they rarely occupy the foreground of my narrative, which is concerned with the joint property tradition in its historical particularity. To analyze this episode of woman’s rights advocacy in such a way as to transform history into grist for theory - so that acts and demands become instances and examples - would obscure what is ultimately most remarkable about the joint property tradition, the simple fact that it was.” Ibid., 1081.
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