"As good Wives ought to be": The Shifting Dynamics of Marriage and Authority

Sarah Pearsall

This essay seeks to determine how conflict was reconciled within loving marriages. In social theory, marriage became less a government in which the husband "ruled" and more a partnership of loving equals. There are echoes of this new paradigm in letters from Revolutionary-era marriages in which the couple was separated by the Atlantic. The wives, at odds with their husbands, attempted to achieve their ends by deploying what I term "the coercive language of affection." Slaves, too, haltingly utilized this idiom, but with less success. Roles for white women and men shifted under the influence of intellectual currents that antedated and transcended the Revolution, most critically the Scottish Enlightenment.

[WP # 00006]