ABSTRACT
Most people, including political scientists, are well acquainted with the association of race discrimination with wrongdoing in the context of American political history. Too often, however, when we turn to gender, we find a narrative that ignores or detaches sex discrimination from stories about legal coercion or conflict, and in so doing, from the very development of the American state or analyses of contemporary American society. We can see the contrast by a comparison of the treatment of two egregious institutions present at the founding of the American state: chattel slavery and coverture marriage.
