The Exit Option: Agency and Divorce in Late Eighteenth-Century America

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.