Kirsten Sword
Biographic Data
| ID | 3977267 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kirsten Sword |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kirsten |
| FAMILY NAME | Sword |
| SIGNATURE | SWORD K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indiana University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 11 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Rethinking the Revolutionary Road to Divorce
Chapter Eight examines the emergence of state legislative action on divorce in the context of transatlantic revolutionary politics, bottom-up pressure from constituents, and sensational cases involving the founding generation’s “first families” and its preeminent legal minds. Blair v. Blair aligned Virginia governor Lord Dunmore and the radical Patrick Henry against Thomas Jefferson, who drafted extensive Notes on Divorce. In conjunction with the…
The Trials of Christopher and Elizabeth Lawson
Christopher and Elizabeth Lawson were Puritan religious radicals who married in 1639 and proceeded to fight one another in and outside of the courts in Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire, Maine and England into the 1670s. Their dispute introduces the broad repertoire of arguments about marriage, separation, and divorce established during the Protestant Reformation. These included adultery, faulty marriage formation, desertion, competing religious o…
Marriage, Slavery, and Anglo-Imperial Jurisdictional Politics
This chapter traces a loosely defined “conversation” linking 1) powerful figures in English government, 2) colonial cases that demonstrate equity in legal localism as well as cognizance of larger debates, and 3) English treatise writers and colonial and Scottish intellectuals who engaged with imperial directives between the 1720s and the 1760s. Attention to this complicated conversation alters a number of historical stories usually told separatel…
Epilogue
Wives Not Slaves
The final two chapters return to the relationship between marriage and slavery as it played out in households and in the law in the decades before and after the American Revolution, 1760 – 1800. Chapter Seven explores multiple, contradictory late eighteenth-century forms of the argument that wives were not slaves. The argument could be used to defend the prerogatives of white women or conversely to challenge the enslavement of women of color. Dur…
Submit or Starve
Chapter Two examines conflict between English aristocrats in a dynastic marriage that created problems for both Parliamentary and royalist authorities during England’s Civil Wars and Restoration. Edward and Catherine Scott’s 1656 parliamentary divorce suit illustrates Interregnum marriage laws and reveals the untold political backstory for Manby v. Scott (1663). In Manby, seventeenth-century England’s leading jurists invoked the patriarchal power…
“In Justice to my Character”
A legal understanding of marriage that emphasized masculine economic rights and portrayed wives as a form of property gained prominence simultaneously with the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility that placed new emphasis on love and friendship as the primary basis for marriage. The culture of sensibility condemned mercenary and exploitative relationships between men and women, though the alternatives it offered remained hierarchical. Coloni…
A Matter of Credit
Chapters Five and Six together analyze colonial newspaper advertisements of husbands’ complaints and wives’ replies, decoding the often misleading language found in elopement notices. An apologetic request that a deserting wife return, for instance, usually meant the advertiser was facing prosecution for domestic violence. Imperial policies favoring creditors and the increasing precedence of the common law (magnified by the popularity of Blacksto…
The Runaway Press
Chapter Three details the gradual and contested process by which, by the 1750s, runaway ads had become a means by which ordinary men extended both their power over and their liability for dependents. The stories of a wife and an enslaved man who appeared side-by-side in the columns of Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette illuminate the legal parallels—and distinctions—between the authority of husbands and the authority of masters. Colonial au…
Wives Not Slaves
"Is marriage a privilege or a right? A sacrament or a contract? Is it a public or a private matter? Where does ultimate jurisdiction over it lie? And when a marriage goes wrong, how do we adjudicate marital disputes-particularly in the usual circumstance, where men and women do not have equal access to power, justice, or even voice? These questions have long been with us because they defy easy, concrete answers. Kirsten Sword here reveals that co…
Remembering Dinah Nevil
What is a founding moment? Who is a founder? Recent scholarship on British antislavery demonstrates why such questions are at once vexing and engaging. In scholarly trade books and popular film timed to coincide with Britain's bicentennial commemoration of the 1807 abolition of the slave trade, Britain's eighteenth-century abolitionists perform cultural work akin to that done by political founders in the United States. Much of this new literature…
Remembering Dinah Nevil
What is a founding moment? Who is a founder? Recent scholarship on British antislavery demonstrates why such questions are at once vexing and engaging. In scholarly trade books and popular film timed to coincide with Britain's bicentennial commemoration of the 1807 abolition of the slave trade, Britain's eighteenth-century abolitionists perform cultural work akin to that done by political founders in the United States. Much of this new literature…
Remembering Dinah Nevil
What is a founding moment? Who is a founder? Recent scholarship on British antislavery demonstrates why such questions are at once vexing and engaging. In scholarly trade books and popular film timed to coincide with Britain's bicentennial commemoration of the 1807 abolition of the slave trade, Britain's eighteenth-century abolitionists perform cultural work akin to that done by political founders in the United States. Much of this new literature…
Rethinking the Revolutionary Road to Divorce
Chapter Eight examines the emergence of state legislative action on divorce in the context of transatlantic revolutionary politics, bottom-up pressure from constituents, and sensational cases involving the founding generation’s “first families” and its preeminent legal minds. Blair v. Blair aligned Virginia governor Lord Dunmore and the radical Patrick Henry against Thomas Jefferson, who drafted extensive Notes on Divorce. In conjunction with the…
The Trials of Christopher and Elizabeth Lawson
Christopher and Elizabeth Lawson were Puritan religious radicals who married in 1639 and proceeded to fight one another in and outside of the courts in Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire, Maine and England into the 1670s. Their dispute introduces the broad repertoire of arguments about marriage, separation, and divorce established during the Protestant Reformation. These included adultery, faulty marriage formation, desertion, competing religious o…
Marriage, Slavery, and Anglo-Imperial Jurisdictional Politics
This chapter traces a loosely defined “conversation” linking 1) powerful figures in English government, 2) colonial cases that demonstrate equity in legal localism as well as cognizance of larger debates, and 3) English treatise writers and colonial and Scottish intellectuals who engaged with imperial directives between the 1720s and the 1760s. Attention to this complicated conversation alters a number of historical stories usually told separatel…
Epilogue
Wives Not Slaves
The final two chapters return to the relationship between marriage and slavery as it played out in households and in the law in the decades before and after the American Revolution, 1760 – 1800. Chapter Seven explores multiple, contradictory late eighteenth-century forms of the argument that wives were not slaves. The argument could be used to defend the prerogatives of white women or conversely to challenge the enslavement of women of color. Dur…
Submit or Starve
Chapter Two examines conflict between English aristocrats in a dynastic marriage that created problems for both Parliamentary and royalist authorities during England’s Civil Wars and Restoration. Edward and Catherine Scott’s 1656 parliamentary divorce suit illustrates Interregnum marriage laws and reveals the untold political backstory for Manby v. Scott (1663). In Manby, seventeenth-century England’s leading jurists invoked the patriarchal power…
“In Justice to my Character”
A legal understanding of marriage that emphasized masculine economic rights and portrayed wives as a form of property gained prominence simultaneously with the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility that placed new emphasis on love and friendship as the primary basis for marriage. The culture of sensibility condemned mercenary and exploitative relationships between men and women, though the alternatives it offered remained hierarchical. Coloni…
A Matter of Credit
Chapters Five and Six together analyze colonial newspaper advertisements of husbands’ complaints and wives’ replies, decoding the often misleading language found in elopement notices. An apologetic request that a deserting wife return, for instance, usually meant the advertiser was facing prosecution for domestic violence. Imperial policies favoring creditors and the increasing precedence of the common law (magnified by the popularity of Blacksto…
The Runaway Press
Chapter Three details the gradual and contested process by which, by the 1750s, runaway ads had become a means by which ordinary men extended both their power over and their liability for dependents. The stories of a wife and an enslaved man who appeared side-by-side in the columns of Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette illuminate the legal parallels—and distinctions—between the authority of husbands and the authority of masters. Colonial au…
Wives Not Slaves
"Is marriage a privilege or a right? A sacrament or a contract? Is it a public or a private matter? Where does ultimate jurisdiction over it lie? And when a marriage goes wrong, how do we adjudicate marital disputes-particularly in the usual circumstance, where men and women do not have equal access to power, justice, or even voice? These questions have long been with us because they defy easy, concrete answers. Kirsten Sword here reveals that co…
Law (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (7 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (5 works) · History (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (3 works) · Gender Studies (3 works) · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies (3 works)