Stray Wives : Marital Conflict in Early National New England

"Stray Wives" examines marriage, familial gender relations, and the law through the lens of "elopement" notices: advertisements that husbands and occasionally wives placed in newspapers to announce their spouses' desertions as well as the details of their marital conflicts.

Using these notices in conjunction with legal treatises, court records, and prescriptive literature, Mary Beth Sievens highlights the often tenuous relationships among marriage law, marital ideals, and lived experience in the early Republic, an era of exceptional cultural and economic change.

The rise of companionate marital ideals and economic changes that brought house-holds more firmly into the developing market economy presented husbands and wives with new challenges as they constructed their marriage relationships.

Couples used elopement notices to negotiate the meaning of these changes, through contests over such issues as husbands' authority and wives' submission, consumer spending, economic support, and property ownership.

The notices and couples' experiences reveal the ambiguous, often contested nature of marital law. Husbands' superior status and wives' dependence were fluid and negotiable, subject to the differing interpretations of legal commentators, community members, and spouses themselves.