Wives Not Slaves

Reviewed by: Wives Not Slaves: Patriarchy and Modernity in the Age of Revolutions by Kirsten Sword Sara T. Damiano Wives Not Slaves: Patriarchy and Modernity in the Age of Revolutions. By Kirsten Sword. American Beginnings, 1500–1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 386 pages. Cloth, ebook. In January 1774, the Boston News-Letter published paired notices by a husband, "Loyalty," and his wife, "American Liberty" (206). Loyalty criticized his wife's "licentious" (206) conduct and disavowed responsibility for her debts; Liberty countered that Loyalty had breached the terms of their marriage contract. These advertisements framed contemporary political debates by imitating a recurring component of midcentury newspapers: the desertion or elopement notices through which spouses publicized and defended informal separations.1 At first glance, Liberty's and Loyalty's announcements lend support to historical narratives that revolutionary ideologies destabilized notions of patriarchal authority. Yet as Kirsten Sword contends in Wives Not Slaves, deeper analysis confounds this interpretation. As she observes, the notices, which appeared in a loyalist rather than a patriot newspaper, ultimately underscored the power of marital bonds by suggesting that the couple should resolve their differences privately. Furthermore, colonial readers understood the News-Letter's parody only because it continued long-standing discourses about the nature of patriarchal authority. In Sword's telling, these conversations spanned the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, encompassing both sides of the Atlantic, and linked men's authority over all dependents, including wives, servants, and slaves. Within this framework, the revolutionary era appears not as a turning point but rather as one of many moments in which household heads and lawmakers subtly reinvented patriarchy's forms. Sword's reappraisal of Liberty's and Loyalty's notices represents the sort of fine-grained, contextualized analysis at which she most excels. She assembles close readings of court records, legal treatises, and notices in newspapers in order to evaluate conceptions of patriarchal authority in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British North America. Though the book originated in the observation that colonial newspapers often included spouses' desertion notices alongside advertisements for runaway servants and slaves, Sword's primary contributions concern the history of the institution of marriage. Above all, Sword argues that the colonial and revolutionary eras were characterized by "continuities in practices of local justice" (286) that upheld husbandly power and limited wives' recourse. The revolutionary era's new discourses of [End Page 486] sensibility and spousal affection, she maintains, in fact buttressed the existing social order and jurists' "recurring trope of an 'ancient' patriarchy" served to "justify patriarchal legal innovations and silence 'domestic' grievances" (286). Sword's study thus challenges the classic argument—exemplified in the work of Lawrence Stone—that women's growing access to divorce constituted a key component of modernization and instead aligns her with the more nuanced work of scholars of family law in the nineteenth-century United States who suggest that legal disputes could at once challenge and reinforce patriarchal institutions.2 In this way, Wives Not Slaves also takes up Judith M. Bennett's call for historians to attend to "patriarchal equilibrium," or the ways in which the adaptability of patriarchal institutions produces long-term continuities in men's status over women.3 Though previous works assessing the changing availability of divorce have predominantly tracked divorce petitions and their outcomes in a single jurisdiction, Sword's study is transatlantic in scope, examining Britain and the British North American colonies of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and, to a lesser extent, Virginia.4 The book also crucially integrates "a range of marital disputes ... in which divorce was not necessarily an option or even an aim" (12), such as those in which spouses contested financial liability or control over property. Sword begins with two in-depth case studies of marital conflicts: the famous 1663 English lawsuit Manby v. Scott—which held that a husband was not obligated to provide for a wife who refused to "submit" (68) to his authority—and a contemporaneous Massachusetts legal battle.5 As Sword shows, men and women on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-seventeenth century mobilized wide-ranging arguments when their marriages soured, and jurists lacked consensus regarding appropriate resolutions for marital conflict

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