Wives Not Slaves: Patriarchy and Modernity in the Age of Revolutions by Kirsten Sword

Abstract

Reviewed by: Wives Not Slaves: Patriarchy and Modernity in the Age of Revolutions by Kirsten Sword Maria O'Malley (bio) Wives Not Slaves: Patriarchy and Modernity in the Age of Revolutions kirsten sword University of Chicago Press, 2021 408 pp. Kirsten Sword's Wives Not Slaves: Patriarchy and Modernity in the Age of Revolutions offers an incisive and compelling argument about how the rise of print, in particular public notices in newspapers, mediated spousal separation and to a certain extent shaped legal discourses surrounding the dissolution of marriage. The book provides ample context for the cases it highlights by tracing the halting and roundabout ways the jurisdictional debate about divorce unfolded in England and in the colonies. Sword finds that "the dramatic growth of the press gave ordinary people power to draw on a transatlantic repertoire of debates about household order, and to make legal and moral arguments independent of the claims of local legal authorities" (12). She notices how advertisements in newspapers were used as an alternative to the law to exempt a spouse from the financial obligations of marriage. Rather than taking a spouse to court for a legal divorce, which would involve a lengthy process and an uncertain verdict, a husband would place an advertisement in a local paper explaining to merchants that he was not responsible for her expenses. Sword includes, as a frontispiece, one such ad placed by John Davis in the New-Hampshire Gazette in 1762 asking for his wife's return as well as distancing himself from any of her finances: "This is therefore to forbid any Person entertaining or harboring her on my Account, or giving her Credit for Money or any Thing whatsoever" (qtd. in Sword 1). Her argument is built on extensive archival evidence that she culls from divorce cases, legal commentaries, ecclesiastical pronouncements, political treatises, novels, letters, personal journals, and newspapers. The study, ultimately, demonstrates how "newspaper [End Page 254] reporting of these phenomena, as well as of parliamentary petitions for full divorce, helped escalate demand for legal and quasi-legal remedies to marital conflict on both sides of the Atlantic" (111). Sword spotlights how these demands shored up or challenged the hegemony of patriarchal systems. The book starts with great promise by explaining in the introduction how racialized figurations shaped the public relations campaigns spouses launched and how, in some ways, the practice of race-based slavery raised new questions about eighteenth-century marriage and divorce. Her study analyzes the phrasing, paradigms, and epistemes that set the terms for marriage law against the background of political revolutions stretching from the Interregnum to the American Revolution. She finds that at times the practice of slavery informed marriage law: "European colonial powers revived [arguments about household patriarchy] to support new forms of government and new forms of slavery between the sixteenth and seventh centuries" (4–5). As evidence, she identifies substantial similarities between newspapers advertisements seeking the return of enslaved people and wives who had absconded. The great strength of the book lies in its close attention to language to broaden the study's scope from divorce to conceptions of slavery and the ties it finds between divorce and the expansion of a credit-based marketplace. The first parts of the book focus on single divorce cases from the sixteenth century: one in the colonies (Christopher and Elizabeth Lawson) and one in England (Manby v. Scott). These cases demonstrate how patriarchy undergirded legal decisions even as those decisions demarcated some limits to males' authority over their households. Sword cites new primary source material to give a more balanced account of these cases. Not until the second half of the book does a reader get an extended treatment of the tropes relying on enslavement for understanding marriage law. The promises of the introduction bear fruit starting in chapter 5 and ripen especially in chapter 8 when the book's argument sharpens and clarifies. Many scholars will find her discussion of aggregated archival work of newspapers notices useful. Much of Sword's archival work involved digging up public notices submitted to local papers by husbands publicizing the behavior of their errant wives to distance themselves from any financial obligations and then the...