Abstract
Thousands of husbands placed advertisements in colonial newspapers announcing that their wives had deserted them and rejecting responsibility for their wives’ debts. Yet few scholars have studied “runaway wives.” This article argues the notices evidenced wives’ agency in a sexist and socially conservative eighteenth-century America, agency that took the form of “exit,” “voice,” and “loyalty,” to follow Hirschman's seminal work. The article examines the texts of almost four hundred listings and arbitrates between two explanations of this phenomenon: whether the notices were published to protect husbands financially or to effect common-law self-divorces. The husbands’ notices were predominantly acknowledgments of broken marriages.
Keywords
On October 9, 1776, Solomon Goodrich of Sharon, Connecticut, advertised that his wife “hath eloped from me.” 1 Mr. Goodrich warned readers of The Connecticut Courant And Hartford Weekly Intelligencer that he would “pay no debt contracted by her” and he forbade “all persons [from] harbouring or entertaining said Esther.” Furthermore, “all persons are forbid harbouring or entertaining said Esther.” 2
Mr. Goodrich's advertisement is noteworthy on three counts. One is that the literature on eighteenth-century American women rarely mentions the fact that, as his advertisement suggests and as subsequent scholarship shows, wives commonly left their husbands and homes. 3 Neither do scholars discuss the sheer volume of advertisements placed by husbands in colonial and state newspapers of their wives’ desertions and their renunciations of their wives’ debts. Neither Nancy F. Cott's pathbreaking research on the cult of domesticity and on divorce in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, nor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's superb investigation of the unheralded and vital role of women in the colonies and early states, nor Linda Kerber's fine analysis and appraisal of the role of women during the Revolutionary Era addresses the desertions of wives from their husbands and homes. 4 Nor does subsequent scholarship on the “misbehaviors” of women and their resistance to patriarchy, 5 on the abuse and violence common in the American colonies—violence often and disproportionately inflicted on women 6 —or on the lives of women of the “lower sort” (i.e., enslaved African Americans, indentured servants, transported convicts, free Blacks, and the white poor) discuss the frequency by which wives left their husbands and homes. 7 And while there is some scholarship on common-law divorce in England and colonial America, few scholars address the significance of the advertisements themselves. 8 There are important exceptions, however, that we address below. 9
A second notable aspect of Solomon Goodrich's advertisement is the response it elicited from his wife, Esther Goodrich. Less than two weeks afterwards, Mrs. Goodrich placed her own advertisement in The Connecticut Courant, And Hartford Weekly Intelligencer, where she described her husband's “injurious conduct toward me.” She “solemnly attest[ed]” to how “in instances too many to be enumerated,” [he had] cruelly pulled my hair—pinch’d my flesh—kick’d me out of the bed—dragged me out by my arms and my heels—dragged me across the room and flung ashes upon me to smother me—haul’d me out of bed in the dead of night, and flung cold water from the well upon me till I had not a dry thread about me, and was obliged to flee to any of the neighbours for help.
10
By publishing their own newspaper responses to their husbands’ advertisements, at least some wives were able to inform a larger sphere of newspaper readers (and newspaper “listeners,” i.e., people who heard the advertisements being read aloud) of how their husbands had abused them. Women could exact a measure of vengeance by publicly shaming their husbands for their actions and thereby damage and possibly ruin their husbands’ reputations as well as potentially reclaiming their own reputations. 12
A third feature of Mr. Goodrich's advertisement is that the text's exact meaning is unclear. Why would Solomon Goodrich publicize the fact that his wife had left him? Why would he forbid fellow colonists from “harbouring or entertaining” Mrs. Goodrich when he had no way to enforce his prohibition, thereby making his imperative a toothless appeal for the cooperation of his fellow countrymen? Why would he advertise the fact that he was cutting off her credit? With the advertisement, Mr. Goodrich would seem to be publicly admitting that his marriage was broken and that he was incapable of regulating his wife's spending. 13 Why would he not be aware of the possibility that his wife might respond with her own newspaper advertisement and thereby further damage his reputation and add to his shame? And yet, as noted above, thousands of husbands in late-eighteenth century America were publishing advertisements announcing their wives’ desertions and their refusal to pay for their wives’ debts.
Given the little scholarship on this phenomenon, the purpose here is to investigate and explain these notices. Fortunately, this need not mean starting from scratch. Two historians, in particular, have studied these advertisements as part of their larger research projects and both scholars provide explanations for why so many husbands were advertising that their wives had “forsaken” their “bed and board.” 14 Interestingly, though, Clare Lyons and Kirsten Sword offer different reasons for this phenomenon. Lyons argues in her research on sexual relations among the “middling” and “lower” sort of the greater Philadelphia area (inclusive of Delaware and parts of New Jersey) that the advertisements constitute “self-divorces.” 15 “Self-divorce,” she explains, was a practice derived from English common law whereby couples could effectively end their marriages by publicly announcing that their wives had left them and that they were rejecting any further responsibility for their wives’ finances. 16
Kirsten Sword, in her case studies of English and colonial American divorce proceedings, finds that the husbands’ advertisements were fundamentally economic measures. 17 Coverture made husbands the owners of their wives’ property, but it also made husbands responsible for their wives’ spending and borrowing. 18 So by notifying newspaper readers of their wives’ desertions and by publicly repudiating their wives’ debts, men were ensuring their financial solvency. No longer did they have to worry that their wives could hurt them financially and potentially leave them penniless or bankrupt.
This article has three objectives. One is to study wives’ desertions as a form of women's agency—i.e., their capacity to act in pursuit of their own objectives. Women of the late eighteenth-century American colonies commonly chose to “elope” from their husbands, yet there is little scholarship on “runaway wives” (although there are studies of divorce in the American colonies and early states). 19 Wives’ choice to abandon their husbands, whether done out of desperation or in the hope of a more fulfilling life, was, however, but one of the options available to wives.
The second purpose of this article is to provide a more capacious framework by which to think of wives’ capacity to leave their marriages within a highly gendered, eighteenth-century America. To this end, we adopt Albert O. Hirschman's trichotomy in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty 20 as a schema by which to analyze the scope and extent of wives’ agency. 21 Specifically, leaving their husbands (“exit,” Hirschman's first option) was but one of the choices wives had for mitigating their often difficult and vulnerable situations within the confines of early American rules and norms. Other wives might share their unhappiness with a larger audience of relatives, friends, neighbors, and townspeople (“voice,” Hirschman's second option) in pursuit of emotional support or to encourage the intervention of relatives or clergymen in more serious cases of domestic violence and other abuse. But most wives stayed with their husbands, either sorting things out within the confines of their marriages or choosing to stay nominally married despite the presence of domestic abuse, adultery, and other issues (“loyalty,” Hirschman's third option).
The third purpose of this article is to explain why husbands published these thousands of advertisements. We rely on late-eighteenth-century newspaper advertisements collected from six colonies/states to arbitrate between these two competing explanations: whether the newspaper advertisements constituted performative acts of self-divorce (“performative” because as a rule nothing substantive changed upon the publication of husbands’ announcements) or the indispensable means by which husbands protected themselves from financial liabilities.
The first part of the article—the three sections of the article do not directly map on to the three objectives—provides background information on women's lives in the American colonies and the early republic. It explains that with coverture, the notion that wives were “covered” under their husbands’ authority and protection, women were almost wholly dependent on their husbands and their property ceded to their husbands. Even so, wives had agency, as noted above. They could influence their husbands by managing marital relations within the household (“loyalty”). They could use their “voice” (the second of Hirschman's options) to notify relatives, friends, neighbors, and townspeople of their unhappy or unfulfilling domestic lives. And they could leave their husbands (Hirschman's “exit”), whether on foot, by horseback, or aboard a boat, and start new lives for themselves.
The second section of the paper investigates wives’ desertions. They could leave their homes because of their husbands’ cruelty, as did Mrs. Esther Goodman (to assume the truth of her advertisement) or because they wanted to improve their lives, away from their existing marriages. A divorce would seem to be the obvious way for wives (and husbands) to end their marriages, but divorce was rarely allowed in the American colonies/states. It was uncommon in New England and almost non-existent in the mid-Atlantic and southern colonies/states (as discussed further, below). And even in colonies where divorces were possible, getting a divorce could be lengthy and often expensive process. 22 As a result, official divorce rates represent a small “fraction of the total number of separations and desertions.” 23 Because of this fact, i.e., the record of legal divorces not being the same as that of permanent marital separations, we take a broader perspective on eighteenth-century American marriages that considers separations holistically, as one of the options available to wives and as an outcome that could be obtained through different means.
The third section considers the reasons for the husbands’ many advertisements of their runaway wives. In order to determine the causes of these thousands of notices, we consulted hundreds of newspaper advertisements from six colonies/states: Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. The study of the content and phrasing of these advertisements allows us to determine whether husbands sought to self-divorce or wanted to protect themselves financially. There were many and mixed motives why husbands advertised their wives’ desertions (unsurprisingly), but the prevailing, insistent lesson we took from reading the many advertisements is of husbands acknowledging their marriages to be over.
I. American Women
Almost all adult women were married, engaged to be married, or soon to be married. 24 Young women usually married not long after reaching physical maturity and once married they were subject to their husbands’ sovereignty. 25 So from the moment they exchanged marriage vows until menopause women were almost always pregnant, 26 nursing their infants, and/or attending to their children (assuming that physical, reproductive, and mental health issues did not intrude). 27 Even the wealthiest and most socially prominent wives were expected to bear and rear children.
Wives’ bodies belonged to their husbands. “Under a patriarchal system, a husband had automatic and indisputable sexual access to his wife,” Sharon Block remarks, and “marital rape [was] a legal and conceptual impossibility.” 28 The sexual “rights” of “gentlemen” or “squires” in the patriarchal colonies could include other household members, such as female servants and (principally in the southern colonies) enslaved persons; men's sexual rights could also extend to incest between fathers and daughters, although incest was neither socially accepted nor religiously sanctioned. 29
Not only were wives responsible for child rearing and effectively the property of their men, but they were also expected to attend to their omnipresent domestic chores: tending the fire, preparing and cooking food, baking, doing housework, washing and mending clothes (including bedclothes), churning butter, making cider, brewing beer, caring for fowl, pigs, milk cows, and other livestock, gardening, preserving fruits and vegetables, and caring for orchards. 30 Older children helped run the household and assisted with caring for infants and supervising their younger siblings. Servants, cooks, wet nurses, governesses, and others assisted wealthier wives, but the woman of the house still had to devote time and energy to the acquisition, management, and supervision of servants and slaves. Few wives got more than a little rest. 31
Protestants of all sects decreed that men were to be disciplined, in control, and protective of their families; matrimony was a sacred bond between husband and wife. 32 Yet eighteenth-century American life was often violent, particularly for women. Physical punishment was an accepted part of household life (and criminal law) and men commonly used force to “punish” their wives, beat their children, and whip their servants and slaves. 33 “Heads of household expected their authority to be instantly acknowledged,” Gordon Wood comments, “and they beat their children and other dependents” with an alacrity and a severity “that today leaves us wincing.” 34 Wives, in turn, might hit their children, servants, and slaves.
Husbands could be violent and emotionally cruel by verbally abusing their wives, being away from their homes, depleting their family's wealth (wealth that wives may have brought to the marriage), committing adultery, and abusing their wives physically and sexually. 35 Given the social expectations, colonial norms, and existing laws at the time, wives had little recourse against their husbands’ harmful actions. Pennsylvania court records, for instance, show that women were often badly injured from their husbands’ severe beatings and were sometimes killed. 36
There were more dangers outside the home. Wives could be the victims of coerced sex or rape (“coerced sex” was without the brute force of rape, Sharon Block explains, and it was initiated by acquaintances or members of the same family or household or family rather than by strangers). 37 Wives were therefore vulnerable to the consequences: physical injury, pregnancy, emotional trauma, public shame, and loss of social status. Conversely, the men who forced sex or who committed rape faced few repercussions in a patriarchal society where men wrote and interpreted the law. 38 They were almost never charged with rape and only infrequently were they convicted of the more common and less serious charge of “fornication.” 39 Rape and adultery were punishable by death, and magistrates were reluctant to send men to the gallows. 40
Men sometimes supported women against rape and sexual assault. Husbands might press charges on behalf of their wives’ sexual assailants and fathers might file suit on behalf of their daughters for the purpose of clearing their names. But such actions were usually more about husbands and fathers punishing the men who assaulted their wives or daughters and about defending their honor and asserting their patriarchal control, than they were about protecting women. 41 The existence of a double standard went without saying. 42
The great majority of rapes went unreported (just as they do today) because of shame, intimidation, and the rejection of survivors’ testimonies as sufficient evidence. 43 Indicatively, only about a third of rape cases in colonial Pennsylvania resulted in convictions. 44 The sole exception to this generalization is that African American men were almost never exonerated from rape charges. 45 Rape as defined and enforced was racially conditioned. 46
Despite the unevenness of this gendered “playing field,” wives had considerable agency.
Husbands had reason to heed their wives’ expressions of discontent. Not only were men and women taught that they were equal under God and each other's complements, 50 but wives were also their husbands’ invaluable helpmates. They were the mothers of their children; they were co-workers in their husbands’ businesses; and they were their agents in transactions with neighbors and townspeople. With their spinning, weaving, gardening, and other “women's work,” they were vital economic producers in their own right who often contributed invaluably to their family's economic well-being. They could be their spouses’ “deputy husbands,” Thatcher Ulrich points out, by keeping business accounts, buying and selling goods, negotiating with customers or debtors, and performing other tasks. Too, they contributed to their family's prosperity with their independent sources of income from working as seamstresses, tavernkeepers, clothiers, milliners, and other remunerative occupations. 51
The great majority of couples, in distinction to the wives and husbands of wealthy families, needed each other to secure their livelihoods, to provide for and rear their children, and, often, simply to survive. 52 Wives were motivated to come to understandings with their husbands and vice versa, however temporary or provisional such settlements. By all appearances these wives and couples abided by the norms of domesticity. And if wealthy wives had more options, they also had more to lose. The result was that most wives appeared to be “loyal” to their husbands and to adhere to the norms and expectations of the day. 53
This is not the whole story, to be sure. Even if most women acceded to their husbands’ and fathers’ wishes and even if most women navigated successfully within a sexist colonial society, wives did things that breached the then-norms of domesticity and religious expectations (often in reaction to their husbands’ inattention, infidelity, or abuse). 54 They behaved in ways counter to cultural norms: they rebelled against their fathers; they resisted and defied their husbands’ demands; they challenged their husbands’ dominance of their bodies; they verbally abused their husbands; they drank; they threw things; and they hit or assaulted their spouses, sometimes with their children's help, when their patience and forbearance gave out. 55 In short, they acted more like men.
Wives’ rebellious action could include having sex outside their marriages, particularly when their husbands had occupations such as serving on ships or working as surveyors that took them away for extended periods. 56 Wives could further exert their agency by using herbal abortifacients and committing infanticide (either by neglecting their babies or through deliberate acts, with infanticide being hard to prove) so as to control their pregnancies and limit the number of children they bore. 57
Whether wives’ agency took the form of adultery or infanticide or, more commonly, aggressive speech and physical violence, their actions largely remained within the home. Husbands and wives alike were motivated to keep up outward appearances and to avoid talk that reflected poorly on them. Thus what might appear to be “loyalty” and conformity in Hirschman's terms may obscure the fact that seemingly stable marriages demanded compromise, tolerance, forbearance, and mutual acceptance—however difficult and unruly that coexistence may have been in practice.
Even the mere possibility that wives might inform others of their problems could get husbands to reduce or possibly arrest their physical abuse, marital infidelity, drinking, and/or other harmful actions. The threat of wives “going public” had the most impact on socially prominent and ambitious men, husbands who feared public disapprobation. 61 It was with this reality in mind that the Virginia House of Burgesses passed laws to prevent “brabbling women” from ruining their husbands’ reputations. 62
This airing of grievances is what Hirschman identifies as “voice,” which he sees as inversely related to “loyalty.” The lower the “loyalty,” the higher the likelihood of persons informing others, Hirschman remarks, and vice versa. 63 Whether it was actually used or simply existed as potential, wives’ voice could protect themselves and reinforce communities’ moral standards. 64
Wives could use their voice through legal action, as well. Women could sue for divorce on several grounds, depending on the colony (see below), but it was pursued infrequently. Wives could also bring charges of rape against neighbors, acquaintances, or strangers, as could their husbands or fathers (as noted above). Even if the victims were unlikely to get a conviction, given that judges preferred to convict men of lesser charges to avoid the death penalty, wives were able to disseminate news of their grievances and could damage (other) husbands’ reputations. “Voice” in this instance could be payback.
Voice was especially effective if women had ready alternatives to remaining at home, such staying with relatives, friends, or neighbors. 65 “The chances for voice to function effectively as a recuperation mechanism are appreciably strengthened if voice is backed up by the threat of exit,” Hirschman writes, “whether it is made openly or whether the possibility of exit is merely well understood to be an element in the situation by all concerned.” 66
Many wives nonetheless did leave their homes. If “loyalty” and “voice” were insufficient, whether because their marriages were not improving or because they wanted more out of their marriages, wives (and sometimes husbands) simply left their spouses. 67
II. Reasons for Leaving
The result is that northern colonies/states allowed for a modest number of divorces, the middle colonies granted very few, and the southern colonies granted almost none at all. Indicatively, the Connecticut legislature granted 390 divorces over the fifty years from 1738 to 1788, and the Massachusetts legislature granted 96 divorces over the 26 years from 1760 to 1786. 70 South Carolina, in contrast, did not allow a divorce until 1868 and the Virginia assembly passed only 42 divorce bills between 1786 and 1827 (out of 268 petitions). 71 Under the Anglican (or Episcopal) Church, divorce petitions were supposed to be handled by ecclesiastical courts, but there were no ecclesiastical courts in Virginia and the other Southern colonies/states. 72
The larger point is that divorce was rare in Britain's American colonies (and in 1773 the Privy Council took the step of prohibiting its royal governors from allowing couples to divorce). 73 One scholar calls eighteenth-century America “a virtually divorceless society.” 74 Although the findings of the Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes refer to England, they largely applied to the American colonies, especially the mid-Atlantic and southern colonies: “it was only from 1753 to 1857 that the doctrine of [marriage] indissolubility was really effective and incapable of any evasion, save the evasion offered to the rich by the legislature and to all by the closely limited law of nullity still in force.” 75
Relief would not come until later, in the nineteenth century, after American independence, the formation of states, and the creation of county courts.
Absent the option of divorce, wives (and husbands) left their homes. This constituted a formidable step. Even with the help of wives' relatives, friends, or specific men—male collaborators are mentioned in a handful of advertisements—most wives had little property and were vulnerable to considerable hardship. For wives without strong support networks, moreover, there was the real possibility of destitution or homelessness, or what contemporaries called depending on the “Providence of God.” 76 Wives nonetheless flooded the exits.
Kirsten Sword compiles records of the husbands’ advertisements for their runaway wives in one or more local newspapers. Indicatively, each issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette—Benjamin Franklin's weekly newspaper—from 1749 onwards had at least one advertisement of a “runaway wife.” Sword discovers that between 1749 and 1800 husbands published a total of 1,240 newspaper advertisements, and this in (only) five of the thirteen colonies. 77
Husbands posted the same descriptions of their eloped wives’ actions in most cases, Sword finds. The wife “has deserted,” “has eloped,” “has abandoned,” “has absented herself,” or “has absconded,” the husbands’ notices read, followed by the statement that they “will not pay any further debts” incurred by their wives or words to similar effect.
The husbands who advertised of their wives’ desertions were from most walks of life. They were rich as well as poor, Sword finds. They worked in more than one hundred different occupations. And they gave a raft of different reasons for their wives’ desertions. Wives left “for reasons unknown,” for “utterly refus[ing] to move to the country,” for having “unjustifiably eloped,” and for other reasons. 78 Only 7 percent of husbands’ advertisements accused their wives of adultery, and they did so obliquely, by phrasing their charges indirectly, such as their wives having “behaved in an improper manner,” having “behaved in an impudent and unbecoming manner,” or having “behaved in a scandalous manner.” 79
Almost all of the advertisements declared that the husbands would henceforth not be held responsible for their wives’ debts. The notices “were fundamentally an economic instrument which husbands used to protect themselves and punish their wives,” Sword writes. 80 In other words, the paramount reason husbands published the advertisements, she argues, was to “dis-credit” their runaway wives.
Credit was the lifeblood of commerce in cash-poor colonial America. But because credit was founded on personal relationships and built-up expectations—trust—the loss of credit could have cascading effects within communities and business networks and have devastating consequences. So if a separated wife ran up debt, she could erode or possibly destroy her husband's credit. 81 Particularly vulnerable were husbands early in their careers, men who had not yet established the line of credit and wide reputation they needed for future success, and less well-to-do husbands, men who could lose what credit and what modest reputation they had thus far achieved. 82 To put Sword's thesis in terms of Solomon Goodrich's advertisement, Mr. Goodrich needed to publicize his wife's desertion so as to have cause for renouncing her debts.
Yet Mr. Goodrich's advertisement can be read another way, one that takes us to Clare Lyons's explanation. According to this alternative view, Solomon Goodrich was notifying Connecticut readers that his wife had left him and that his privileges and obligations under coverture had ceased. He was declaring that for all practical purposes he and Esther were no longer husband and wife and that both were now free to live their own lives. For Lyons, husbands’ advertisements first and foremost constituted “self-divorce.”
Self-divorce was a common-law tradition in British North America, dating back to sixteenth-century England and mainly used by non-elites in lieu of legal divorce. 83 “[P]arties would just walk out on each other when they thought this to be expedient,” Gerhard Mueller observes, and “the courts were rarely bothered” to try wives (or husbands) “for desertion or bigamy after marrying again.” 84 Thus by advertising that their wives had deserted—as opposed to the husbands and wives merely living apart—husbands were publicly repudiating their marriages. By renouncing their obligations under coverture to an audience of colonial readers, they were for all intents and purposes making their separation official. 85 Consistent with this argument, some newspaper editors (including Franklin at the Pennsylvania Gazette) insisted on a magistrate's certification of the husband's claim of his wife's abandonment so as to protect against fraud (husbands hiding assets from creditors) and to prevent bigamy. 86
Because Sword and Lyons both present credible accounts of husbands’ advertisements—as instruments for the prevention of financial loss or as the instantiations of self-divorce—the following section consults the texts of hundreds of advertisements of runaway wives collected from six mid-Atlantic and New England colonies so as to determine which of the two arguments offers the more compelling explanation.
The advertisements reveal several patterns.
In almost all of the advertisements, husbands renounced their financial obligations for their wives’ debts (as Sword also observes). An example follows: Eleanor the wife of me the Subscriber, hath without Subscriber, hath without any reason or cause eloped my house on the 11th of January last.—These are therefore to warn all persons from trusting her on my account, for I am resolved to pay no debts of her contracting. JACOB GRIFFIN. Newbury-Port, February 9th. 1774. The Essex Journal And Merrimack Packet: Or, the Massachusetts and New-Hampshire General Advertiser, February 9, 1774; February 16, 1774; March 2, 1774.
Yet Jacob Griffin's statement is as much as most notices reveal about marital finances. Fewer than one in ten of husbands’ advertisements (n = 32) indicate that husbands had specific monetary or financial concerns. These latter notices proclaimed wives had “made contracts without [the husbands’] consent” or, more commonly, that their wives had “run [them] into debt.” The following is an example: SARAH the wife of me the subscriber, hath without any reason or cause eloped and wilfully deserted my house, and as I have reason to think she may run me in debt.—These are therefore to warn all persons not to give her any credit upon my account, for I will not pay any one penny for her. David Riley. Wethersfield, December 21, 1773. The Connecticut Courant, From December 28, 1773, to January 4, 1774; From January 4, to January 11, 1774
David Riley has “reason to think” his wife may incur future debts. Most of the advertisements that emphasized the couples’ finances (20 of 32) blamed wives for having embezzled or stolen from their husbands.
91
The advertisements had a factual tone and, as a rule, manifested a formulaic quality, identical or equivalent to Jacob Griffin's notice above. Almost half of the notices (n = 182) provide no detail beyond a minimal statement of wives having “eloped,” having “left” their husbands, or having “absented” themselves from their husbands’ “bed and board.” They then use stock phrases to establish that the husbands rejected any responsibility for their wives’ debts. A majority of husbands’ advertisements (n = 203) explain why their wives “ran away.” Husbands stated that their wives had left “without just cause,” “absconded without reason,” and “refus[ed] to return,” among other phrases that blamed their spouses. Some of the notices, we found, did explicitly charge their wives with breaking the marriage bond. Husbands wrote that wives were “living in adultery,” had “behaved in an indecent manner,” had “become a concubine to another man,” and had “prostituted herself to other lovers,” among other accusations. Still other advertisements announced that their wives had “behaved in a lewd and indecent manner” and “breached the marriage contract,” had “been guilty of unchastity and had an illegitimate child,” and had “broken [their] marriage contract in many flagrant instances.” I Married Catharine in February, 1767, and within three months she left my bed, and shew’d a great disposition for rebellion, and told her children not to mind me, and in eight months my goods and stock were all attached for her debts; and finally, after a second attachment I came to an arbitration, and it took almost all we had to pay here [sic] children. Soon after, my wife kept unreasonable hours with another man, as first came to light by her own sister: I mean to others besides myself, and were often seen together in the night season; and about two years ago were found late in the night in a tight room, partly undressed and the bed cloths turned down, and sundry times been seen in an unbecoming posture; and this can be proved by plenty of evidence and has never own’d herself in the least to blame to me. If she should make any reasonable confession, I should freely forgive her. SAMUEL GRIDLEY. Dated at Farmington, October 24, A.D. 1774. The Connecticut Courant, and Hartford Weekly Intelligencer, October 31, 1774; August 16, 1774; and October 31, 1774.
The tone of these advertisements suggest that husbands were seeking to “punish” their wives by cutting them off financially (consistent with Sword's analysis).
92
The following example is on point—albeit with a twist, Mr. Gridley was willing to forgive his wife:
The overwhelming majority of husbands’ advertisements offer no evidence of the couple being the subject of gossip.
93
Because of the delay between when a wife left her husband and when the husband advertised her elopement, because of the advertisements’ typically matter-of-fact tone, and because of the efficiency of word of mouth, it is highly unlikely that the relatives, friends, and acquaintances of the estranged couple would not have already been aware of the couple's situation.
94
The husbands’ advertisements were not a form of “voice” in other words (in terms of disseminating information in order to secure additional leverage or to mitigate emotional distress), because the notices were publicizing information that persons acquainted with husband and wife would have already known. Only two of the 382 advertisements indicated that the couples mutually agreed to separate or that husbands were being considerate. Joseph Robinson of Windham, Connecticut, announced he was “moving away…and his wife refuses to go with him”—suggesting that the husband and wife mutually agreed to separate, with neither willing to alter their plans for the sake of the other.
95
Joseph Nightingale of Rhode Island advertised that he and Sarah had reached an understanding that they were unable to live together (“mutually agreed to part from each other”) and so he would no longer pay for her debts.
96
And Rufus Harris of Rhode Island asked for information of his wife's location; his “Lucy” was “in a deranged state.”
97
In a handful of advertisements (n = 8) husbands retracted their previous notices. John Robie of Chester, N.H., advertised in mid-1777 that he and his wife, Naomi Robie, had reconciled, for instance. He declared that he regretted his advertisement of almost two years previously that his wife had eloped and had been “stroll[ing] from farmhouse to farmhouse.”
98
Moses Hills, also of Chester, N.H., announced in December 1777 that he was rescinding his three-month-old advertisement. Hills informed readers that he and Sarah were living together again, that their marriage had been rekindled, and that Sarah should henceforth “receive all the privileges of a wife.”
99
And John Cooper of Rhode Island, to give a last example, advertised on October 10, 1778, that he was revoking his year-old notice declaring that his wife, Polly, was not to be trusted.
100
Children were rarely an issue (n = 9), probably because under patriarchy children belonged to their fathers.
101
Jonathan Stables of Cumberland, Rhode Island, publicized the fact that his wife, Freelove Staples, had a child with her when she left.
102
Thomas Elton of Burlington, New Jersey, advertised that his wife, Margaret, left him with a child “not a year old.”
103
And August Babcock of South Kingston, R.I., informed readers that his wife, Mary Babcock, had “carried off two of my children.”
104
The cumulative impression from the nearly four hundred advertisements we studied is that wives frequently exercised their agency by leaving their husbands and that they did so for a variety of reasons, some much more common and much more compelling than others. Relatively few husbands announced that their wives had either stolen from them or run then into debt. Some husbands seemed to indicate a desire for retribution. Children were rarely an issuee. Instead, most of the advertisements read as the husbands’ matter-of-fact announcements of their marriages being at an end and as their repudiation of any of their wives’ debts. These notices were also often accompanied with brief explanations of why their wives had left them; sometimes these notices reflected husbands’ bitterness and even anger.
Taken collectively, the dominant message is that the husbands were declaring faits accomplis; the hundreds of advertisements appear to be acknowledgments of the severing of marital bonds. If some husbands seemed to hold their wives responsible (they “behaved disorderly” or they “behaved in an unbecoming manner”)—assuming that the husbands’ claims can in the main be believed—the great majority of the notices manifested a flat, calm tone. Further indicative of the post hoc quality of the advertisements, none of them requested information about where their wives were, even when they had taken the children. 105 Neither did the husbands’ notices demand that their deserted wives return the furniture, clothing, plate, and other goods they had taken from the home. 106
In sum, the unemotional and incurious phrasing of most of the advertisements is more consistent with Lyons's explanation of these notices as constituting self-divorce. Further supporting this assessment is that relatively few advertisements mentioned financial impropriety, the point of Sword's emphasis; husbands may have even been willing to accept their wives’ spending, up to a point. 107 The fact that husbands’ listing almost never expressed concern for their wives’ well-being or requested information on whom their wives were living with suggests husbands already knew where their separated wives were and where they were staying. So by advertising that their wives had abandoned them and by renouncing their financial obligations as husbands, husbands were at once ceding their benefits and repudiating their obligations under coverture. In effect, they were relinquishing their wives—where the texts of almost all of the advertisements we examined indicate that the husbands believed they had no other choice. 108
This analysis accords with Gerhard's analysis of the effect of English eighteenth-century law: the middle and lower classes had little option but to divorce without official sanction. The expense and difficulty of parliamentary (or legislative) divorce “led to evasions of the law,” Gerhard writes, which “developed into practices and customs, becoming unofficial law to the respective classes that used them.”
109
The unavailability of divorces had led to experiments with evasion of the law. The evasions were tolerated, intentionally or by oversight and ignorance on the part of the officialdom, probably the former. The absence of ill consequences for the parties concerned led to imitations which grew into practices and customs and became unofficial law for the respective classes, again tolerated, intentionally or unintentionally, since the law-obeying and law-making population parts felt no public danger.
110
Lyons explains that colonial Pennsylvanians “believed that ending a marriage was acceptable, even advantageous and just, under certain circumstances,” despite the fact that divorce was not officially possible, and that newspaper advertisements were the means to effect such dissolutions. 111 She grounds the origins of common-law divorce “in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English and Welsh plebeian practices of self-marriage and self-divorce,” with the obvious implication being that what people accepted as common law in Pennsylvania was also accepted by people in the other colonies.
These notices were about more than husbands protecting their property and safeguarding their credit, then, notwithstanding the renunciation of coverture being a central feature of their advertisements. 112 The notices were about dissolving marriages and therefore necessarily about terminating husbands’ financial obligations to their wives. Divorce, as Kerber puts it, “uncovered” the femme covert. 113 By publicizing the husbands’ accounts of their wives’ desertions and by renouncing their financial obligations, the advertisements established that they and their departed wives were both now at liberty to remarry. 114
In this sense Kirsten Sword gets it right: the husbands’ (and wives’) advertisements were integrally connected to colonial law. The listings reflected the “underlying legal framework,” one that existed “throughout the eighteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic” and that derived from the Scottish Enlightenment and Blackstone's common law. 115 The advertisements, Sword continues, manifested colonial Americans’ adaptations of the received law of Blackstone and Coke on marriage. 116 But the husbands’ notices were very much informal and unofficial legal remedies, hence the great difference in the numbers of colonial divorces and, as revealed in the newspaper advertisements, the numbers of self-divorces.
The advertisements placed by the separated wives corrected the public record. They contradicted husbands’ statements by reporting the physical abuse and emotional distress inflicted on them by their husbands and, by so doing, served to reclaim their reputations. 119 Rosanna Scott, to give one example, responded to her husband's advertisement by stating that her purpose for “this listing [was] to make the public aware of the abuse she suffered from her ex-husband.” Mrs. Scott wanted to “redeem her character” and to establish “once and for all that his statements that she ran him into debt are false. I have too long suffered from his Hands.” 120 Likewise, Catharine Thomas advertised that her husband, Moses Thomas, had “running him in debt, deserting him, &c.” Contrary to his published accusations, Mrs. Thomas informed Connecticut readers that he had “squandered away” her “moveable estate which belonged to me and my children.,” and that she had actually been responsible with his finances. The reason she had left their home in Salem was because of his extreme physical abuse. 121 And Peggy Holmes declared that she had left her husband because he “cruelly beaten” her and her two children in ways that “would be imprudent to state in a newspaper.” 122
Some of the wives who took out their own newspaper advertisements informed their fellow colonists of their husbands’ adultery. Rachel Gardette responded to her husband's notice by declaring that James Gardette had left her for a “harlot.” He had stolen the household furniture to support his “strumpet,” moreover, and had left his wife destitute and with a child to care for. Rachel emphasized that she was James's wife, not Elizabeth Brown (with whom he was “living in New London”). Mrs. Gardette hoped “to bring my said husband to a sense of the injury he has done me and to prevent him from deluding other simple women.”
123
Another example is the notice placed by Mary DeCamp, published two months after her husband's advertisement: MARY DECAMP, HAVING lately been advertised in the public news-papers, as having eloped from her husband, Morris Decamp, of Elizabeth-Town, whereby the public would naturally be led to conclude, that she had in some respect or other misbehaved to her said husband. Therefore, in vindication of her injured character, she thinks herself obliged to declare, that tho’ in marrying him she disobliged all her friends, and always behaved as a faithful and dutiful wife to him; yet she has experienced from him continual ill usage of the worst kind; that for a criminal attempt upon a young woman, he was obliged to leave the place, and she was reduced to the necessity of returning to her mother.—That when the affair was made up, and she was prevailed on, to live with him again, by his lewd commerce with other women, he contracted and designedly communicated to her, a loathsome disease, which greatly endangered her life, and from which she with great difficulty recovered.—Since which, not thinking herself safe with him, she has continued with her mother; and her husband has absconded, to avoid the payment of his debts. The New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, March 2, 1775; March 9, 1775. See The New-York Journal; or, The General Advertiser, January 19, 1775.
Mary Decamp was not only informing the world of her husband's “continual ill usage of the worst kind,” but also exacting revenge.
A few of the wives’ advertised that their husbands had left them and that they would not support their husband's debts. Mary Quackinbush of New Brunswick, N.J., notified her fellow colonists that John Quackinbush had “left her bed and board, and contrary to all reason and [C]hristianity, strip[p]ed her of her goods and bedding that she has nothing left to subsist upon.” Mrs. Quackinbush would not pay any of her husband's debts, she announced, since he had abandoned his wife and home. 124 Sarah Smith of Salem, N.J. notified readers of her refusal to pay for her husband's debts (in verse!) since he was pretending to be single: “I nine years have been his wife, tho’ he for a widower doth pass, when he meets a suitable lass; for his wicked doings I never more can him abide, nor he never more shall lie by my side.” 125 Mary Howell of Philadelphia proclaimed to readers that her husband had “denied her house and home, and every other necessity of life, injuriously treated her contract, and wronged her in instances too numerous to relate.” She stressed that she was legally married to Henry Howell and that she would “assert her claim as the law directed” were her husband to try to marry again. And, being a wealthy woman, Mrs. Howell further stated that “she would give him no more than 100 a year from her estate.” 126
These advertisements reveal that men grossly mistreated their wives, that they deprived their wives materially, and that they had been unfaithful. 127 Neither—as is the case today—did wealth protect wives from their husbands’ abuse. 128 What the timing of these advertisements further show is that wives were increasingly asserting their agency as the eighteenth century wore on; they were using their voice to contradict their husbands’ accounts of why they deserted. Lyons remarks on this chronology of wives’ own advertisements, with New England advertisements beginning in 1775 and the Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Delaware notices dating since 1762, 1757, and 1768, respectively. She explains the growing presence of wives’ advertisements as the result of increasingly progressive and more sexually liberated social mores, 129 where wives increasingly questioned their subordinate position under a patriarchal colonial order and challenged the supposed parallel between the sovereignty of the patriarch and the sovereignty of the state. 130 Indicative of this change in late-eighteenth and early nineteenth American society, the colonies began to modify their divorce laws once they became states. 131
Conclusion
Laura Thatcher Ulrich brings welcome attention to the importance of an extensive, hidden women's economy of bartering and trade, of making and fulfilling customer orders for foodstuffs, dried goods, or other products, of small-scale manufacturing, and of conducting commercial negotiations on the behalf of their husbands. This informal, unnoticed economy complemented and functioned alongside the official economy of measured productivity. 132
Not unlike this obscured economic system limned by Thatcher Ulrich, there was an overlooked intimate society that coexisted with court proceedings, legislative petitions, criminal indictments, and other official events. Here, too—notwithstanding a patriarchal and violent colonial America and early United States—wives had more agency than has hitherto been recognized. 133 For one, wives sometimes did not conform to community expectations or follow religious norms. They “misbehaved.” 134 They engaged in “suspect” actions. 135 They committed “intimate violence.” 136 They could be “nasty.” 137 And “far from being the passive objects of men's passions,” Kathleen Brown remarks, women “appear to have managed their sexual activities carefully with an eye to the future.” 138 The less-noticed domestic sphere was not always orderly or benign.
Within marriage, too—and marriage was the “future” most women focused their eyes upon—wives had several choices about what they could do if they were unhappy or unfulfilled: to stay, to share their discontent with others, or, if sufficiently motivated or desperate, to leave their husbands, their children, and their marriages. If they could find ways to make their marriages work; they were loyal to their husbands, in Hirschman's terms. Other wives, presumably in dysfunctional, less happy marriages, could use their voice to inform others, outside the household, of their circumstances and thereby unburden themselves, share their experiences and emotions, and potentially improve their circumstances. 139 Or, contrary to the rules of the ostensibly religious and conservative American colonies and often borne out of desperation, they might leave their husbands. And the fact that colonial law prohibited almost all divorces did not stop divorce; it simply caused husbands and wives to divorce by other means. 140
Although we do not have much information on women's lives within their marriages and although we do not have systematic evidence on the form and content of wives’ informal communication—their “brabbling”—with those with whom they confided in their speech and correspondence, we do have evidence of the wives’ choices to leave their marriages. Thousands of wives did something about their unhappy marriages, as the husbands’ many advertisements of their “runaway” wives show; they left their husbands, their homes, and their families behind.
These advertisements confirm the fact that sometimes, as Clare Lyons and other scholars indicate, wives played active roles in their separations. Wives “kept company with men and behaved very rudely,” according to their husbands. They “behaved in an unbecoming manner” and they “violated the marriage contract.” Other men notified newspaper readers that their wives were “unfaithful,” had “eloped from the husband's bed,” and had “been ‘criminally familiar’” with another man. In short, by taking actions in response to their husbands’ cruelty or by keeping company with other men and going outside their marriages, wives were able to sever the marital bond.
What this article shows is just how frequently wives deserted their husbands, seemingly for good. Furthermore, these dynamics are but partially and imperfectly captured by the records of divorce proceedings in the colonies and early states.
Henry H. Foster and Virginia S. Jordan's observations of the early 1960s still hold: “insufficient attention has been paid to informal or irregular divorce which is so widespread that by analogy it may be called ‘common law divorce.’ The latter is as much a social reality as a private or clandestine marriage.” 141 This article moves attention to common-law divorce as revealed in the great number of newspaper advertisements in the American colonies and states. By so doing, it opens the door to further research on wives’ desertions.
One obvious area for further work is to expand the number of advertisements to include the notices from more colonies/states beyond the six studied here. This may allow for a determination of the systematic differences in the quantity and content of husbands’ advertisements across colonies and regions, given the different laws, demography, and dominant religions of the American colonies. Another area for more research is to include newspaper advertisements from uniform periods of time, which would facilitate a better grasp of the absolute and relative changes in self-divorces across the colonies/states.
A third area calling for more study is more detailed information on individual marriages, both those in which the couples stayed together and those in which the husbands and wives separated. The advertisements examined above, almost all published by men, necessarily offer a one-sided view of the marriages. When husbands advertised the retraction of their earlier notices and when separated wives published their own listings, we find out more about the relationships of these husbands and wives. We can also learn about colonial marital relations from divorce records. 142 But even in these instances, we get only a partial (if an improved) understanding. There may be select cases in which it is possible to match newspaper advertisements with finer-grained information from diaries, correspondence, family papers, or other documents. Did marriages actually disintegrate in stages, from wives working out marital issues within the household (being “loyal”), to them sharing their discontent with their relatives, friends, neighbors, and others (using their “voice”), to then being sufficiently unhappy to want to physically leave their husbands’ homes and families? What were the underlying and proximate causes for wives to take the fateful step of leaving their husbands and homes and effectively ending their marriages?
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Lee Boyle, Shannon Cavanagh, Lauren Gutterman, Clare Lyons, Jane Junn, Paul Kens, Roderick Phillips, Polly Sparrow, Carla Underhill, and two anonymous readers for their help. Skylar Epstein provided invaluable research assistance and a needed alternative perspective on the text.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
