Rachel N. Klein - Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Domestication of Free Labor Ideology - Legacy 18:2 Legacy 18.2 (2001) 135-152 Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Domestication of Free Labor Ideology Rachel Naomi Klein University of California, San Diego Through much of her voluminous writing, Harriet Beecher Stowe expressed her concern with the subject of work—its structure, its moral imperative, its regional variations, and its impact on family life. Her utopian vision of a free and democratic labor system informed her critique of slavery and shaped her analysis of the "woman's sphere." This essay foregrounds Stowe's central preoccupation with the labor questions of her own day and, in so doing, engages a tradition of feminist literary scholarship that invests Stowe's work with anti-commercial meanings. Rather than a subversive critic of the marketplace, Stowe was a substantial contributor to the intellectual history of American liberalism. That Stowe scholarship comes close to being an industry in its own right was, perhaps, over-determined by the author's unique position within the literary culture of mid-nineteenth-century America. She was born in 1811 , the daughter of an eminent New England minister, and was, by the time of the Civil War, the most widely acclaimed of her several distinguished siblings. In many respects, Stowe's work exemplified themes that were common in the popular women's fiction of the mid-nineteenth century, but it also helped to...