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

In January 1774, the Boston News-Letter published paired notices by a husband, “Loyalty,” and his wife, “American Liberty” (206). Loyalty criticized his wife’s “licentious” (206) conduct and disavowed responsibility for her debts; Liberty countered that Loyalty had breached the terms of their marriage contract. These advertisements framed contemporary political debates by imitating a recurring component of midcentury newspapers: the desertion or elopement notices through which spouses publicized and defended informal separations.1 At first glance, Liberty’s and Loyalty’s announcements lend support to historical narratives that revolutionary ideologies destabilized notions of patriarchal authority. Yet as Kirsten Sword contends in Wives Not Slaves, deeper analysis confounds this interpretation. As she observes, the notices, which appeared in a loyalist rather than a patriot newspaper, ultimately underscored the power of marital bonds by suggesting that the couple should resolve their differences privately. Furthermore, colonial readers understood the News-Letter’s parody only because it continued long-standing discourses about the nature of patriarchal authority. In Sword’s telling, these conversations spanned the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, encompassing both sides of the Atlantic, and linked men’s authority over all dependents, including wives, servants, and slaves. Within this framework, the revolutionary era appears not as a turning point but rather as one of many moments in which household heads and lawmakers subtly reinvented patriarchy’s forms. Sword’s reappraisal of Liberty’s and Loyalty’s notices represents the sort of fine-grained, contextualized analysis at which she most excels. She assembles close readings of court records, legal treatises, and notices in newspapers in order to evaluate conceptions of patriarchal authority in seventeenthand eighteenth-century British North America. Though the book originated in the observation that colonial newspapers often included spouses’ desertion notices alongside advertisements for runaway servants and slaves, Sword’s primary contributions concern the history of the institution of marriage. Above all, Sword argues that the colonial and revolutionary eras were characterized by “continuities in practices of local justice” (286) that upheld husbandly power and limited wives’ recourse. The revolutionary era’s new discourses of