Resurrecting the Thirteenth Amendment to Save Women’s Control Over Their Bodies, Their Labor

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

With this one sentence of thirty-two words, the legal basis for the evil institution of slavery in the United States was abolished. Or was it?

Contrary to popular belief, the Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves. That Proclamation only declared that the Civil War became a war over slavery. It was the guns of the Union Army, and a General Strike by enslaved Blacks and poor Whites in the South, which actually accomplished the liberation of those held in slavery. See W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America. The Thirteenth Amendment made this official. Even then, the 27-state threshold for ratification, certified on December 18, 1865, could only have been achieved because of Union military occupation of the Confederate states.

Although the Thirteenth Amendment was supposed to be “self-executing without any ancillary legislation,” Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3, 20 (1883), it has…