Reviewed by Lisa Wilson | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3

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Reviewed by Lisa Wilson | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Lisa Wilson, Connecticut College

Stray Wives: Marital Conflict in Early National New England. By Mary Beth Sievens. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 184 pages. $42.00 (cloth).

This wonderful little book uses understudied newspaper notices of spousal abandonment (elopement notices) to uncover the inner workings of early national marriages. Starting with advertisements in Connecticut and Vermont newspapers published from 1790 to 1830, Mary Beth Sievens then searched through county court records, probate material, divorces, and vital statistics to flesh out these marriage snapshots. She also used print sources such as magazines and advice literature to set a broader context for her study. The result is a fascinating and complex account of husbands struggling to assert their legal dominance in a changing cultural environment as their wives insisted on their rights as economic partners. Sievens argues that industrialization changed the New England cultural landscape, while the law remained static. In a similar divergence, the language of husbands placing the advertisements continued to emphasize the patriarchal ideal, whereas their absconding wives insisted on an acknowledgement of the reality of economic partnership in marriage. By 1830 these elopement notices lost much of their wonderful individualized content and simply became boilerplate. Sievens argues that it was the rise of domestic ideology coupled with new ideas about familial privacy that limited them.

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