“Wives not Slaves is a must-read for anyone interested in the interplay between popular culture and law. Readers will appreciate both the narrative power of its case studies and the elegance of its arguments. This powerful book not only deconstructs the feminist analogy of marriage as slavery, it reassesses the notion of expanding equality in the age of revolution. Better yet, it is filled with thought-provoking implications for our own age.”

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Harvard University

“Sword unsilences the past, recovering the cacophonous voices of all the ordinary wives and husbands who put their domestic unions on trial in the pages of early American newspapers. A keenly argued study of the making and breaking of colonial marriages in the court of public opinion, Wives Not Slaves explains how marital practices developed in dialogue with the elaboration of other species of household dependence even as it eviscerates the false equivalence between divorce and emancipation.”

Richard Bell, University of Maryland

"Sword’s decades of hard work pay off with a clear, intriguing, and articulate discussion of marriage law as it developed in the American colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. . . . Sword has found a creative, intricate, and refreshing way to approach the history of marriage law and colonial life . . . The timely nature of Sword’s publication in the era of #metoo and #blacklivesmatter allows the author to engage in historical conversations, the legacies of which are still felt today. Sword’s work engages with colonial, American, feminist, slave, and legal histories as well as conversations in anthropology, sociology, and government. . . . Through the use of enticing prose, seductive narratives, and provocative peculiarities, Wives Not Slaves will undoubtedly find its place among scholars, students, and citizen historians for years to come."

H-Net

"Highly recommended. . . A beautifully written, strongly argued narrative that will transform how readers think about the evolution of women’s rights in the colonial US. "

Choice

"Sword reconstructs the stories of wives who fled their husbands between the mid-seventeenth and early nineteenth century US, comparing their plight with that of other runaway dependents. She explores the links between local justice, the emerging press, and transatlantic political debates about marriage, slavery, and imperial power."

Law & Social Inquiry

"This excellent, fine-grained study connects legal regimes to patriarchy’s quotidian preservation. . . . [Sword's] detailed analysis historicizes the workings of patriarchy and women’s defiance in ways that feminist theory and other disciplinary perspectives may overlook."

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"Though Sword began researching runaway wives and slaves more than twenty years ago, Wives Not Slaves reads as equally urgent today. As Sword notes, this is in part due to the recent #MeToo movement, which has highlighted the persistence of patriarchal authority. Yet the relevance of Sword’s book is equally a testament to the originality and the incisiveness of her analysis. Wives Not Slaves reshapes our understanding of coverture, legal treatises, and desertion notices, calling attention to reinventions of patriarchy in the eighteenth century and our own time." 

William and Mary Quarterly

"Kirsten Sword’s Wives Not Slaves: Patriarchy and Modernity in the Age of Revolutions offers an incisive and compelling argument about how the rise of print, in particular public notices in newspapers, mediated spousal separation and to a certain extent shaped legal discourses surrounding the dissolution of marriage. The book provides ample context for the cases it highlights by tracing the halting and roundabout ways the jurisdictional debate about divorce unfolded in England and in the colonies."

Early American Literature

"The fruit of Sword’s close scrutiny of thousands of elopement and run-away advertisements printed in eighteenth-century newspapers throughout British America regarding absconding wives, and on several occasions, husbands, Wives
Not Slaves provides deft analysis of English and American marital law and paints a powerful portrait in which colonial women achieved a precarious agency."

Eighteenth-Century Studies