On July 13, 1803, John Martin of Middlebury, Vermont, posted a notice in Middlebury Mirror: Whereas Rachel, my wife, has, without any just provocation, eloped from my bed and board,-These are to forbid all persons harbouring or trusting her on my account, as I will pay no debts of her contracting after this date. Directly above John Martin's statement was a counterclaim written by Rachel Martin, explaining her version of couple's marital difficulties: Whereas John Martin, my husband, has eloped from my bed and board without any just provocation, and has willfully refused and neglected to in any degree for support of myself and family,-These are, therefore, to forbid all persons trusting or harboring him on my account, as I will not pay any debts of his contracting after this date. After appearing for two weeks, these notices vanished from Mirror, leaving uncertain John and Rachel Martin's fate. Over one thousand of these elopement notices appeared in Vermont newspapers between 1790 and 1830, lifting protagonists in these marital dramas out of obscurity for a brief moment, then dropping them back into anonymity without any apparent resolution to their unhappy situations.1 Posting newspaper notices advertising marital difficulties was a common way of handling marital conflict throughout New England. For example, 278 notices appeared in Connecticut's leading newspaper, Courant, between 1790 and 1830, 199 notices appeared in Vermont Journal in same time period, and Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Massachusetts, published 117 such notices (see Table 1). Individual advertisements such as Martins' seem to offer little more than brief glimpses into particular marital troubles. In aggregate, however, these notices a window into legal status and actual experiences of husbands and wives. On its own, John Martin's notice offers compelling evidence of legal disadvantages with which married women coped under common law doctrine of coverture. According to this principle of common law, the very being or legal existence of wife is suspended during marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of When a couple married, husband received legal control of his wife's real property, wages, and labor. In return, law required him to provide his wife with necessaries suitable to her situation and his condition in life; and she contracts debt due for them ... he is obliged to pay those debts. While marriage endured, common law recognized only one exception to this obligation: if a wife elopes... husband is not chargeable even for necessaries, at least person who furnishes them is sufficiently apprized [sic] of elopement. Printing a notice in a newspaper enabled a husband to inform merchants and artisans that his financial obligations toward his wife had ceased because she had left him.2 Husbands' notices, then, were patriarchal tools that highlighted and reinforced married women's economic dependence on their spouses. In a society in which cash was scarce, credit was essential to any commercial transaction. Depriving a woman of ability to charge items to her husband's account could leave her without any means of support. Husbands' legal ability to grant and withdraw credit to their dependents allowed them to punish their errant wives; lack of credit could leave a woman no other option than to return to her one source of economic support-her husband. In fact, an analysis of lives of 100 Vermont couples who appeared in newspaper postings between 1790 and 1830 reveals that at least 24 of these couples reconciled.3 John Martin's notice may show that husbands held a tremendous amount of legal power over their wives; however, Rachel's notice demonstrates that married women also had access to resources and opportunities to act in their own interests. …