Word: chattel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Writing a novel about slavery in the U.S. would seem to be a fail-safe endeavor. The audience for such a book is already converted: the evil of owning men, women and children as chattel is shamefully obvious to everyone, and the heroes and villains are easy to tell apart. But it is precisely the contemporary consensus on human bondage that makes serious fiction on this subject so rare and so difficult to achieve. Imaginative literature at its best does not reinforce received opinions but disturbs them, puts them to the test of experience relived. And what is obvious...
...Kammen (Children of Paradox) at the University of Louisville: You must keep in mind that the meaning of personal liberty has altered repeatedly over time, in part because the concept is not explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. Insofar as it has variously meant liberty of conscience, opposition to chattel slavery, freedom from physical restraint, freedom of political association, freedom from surveillance where no threat to the state is involved, and a right to privacy that includes control over one's body, it has drawn upon both of the great traditions of liberty in the history of Western thought: negative...
...defending her bill, Dworkin said the First Amendment was written by white men, most of whom owned women as chattel and Black slaves. She said they saw the First Amendment as a vehicle to protect their power over the people they owned...
Pornography springs from men treating women as "chattel whores," Dworkin said, adding. "If we assumed these women were human beings, we would destroy all pornography with our bare hands...
...auction was grimly reminiscent of slave sales in the antebellum South, conducted for much the same reason: "pleasure" and profit. Today more and more concerned people hope that the slavery of animals eventually will be viewed with the same disgust, and condemned with the same moral righteousness, as human chattel...