Nearly all adults in early America expected to marry at some point in their lives.¹ Husbands and wives fought and quarreled, loved and hated, and in many ways behaved much as they do today. What marriage—and the roles of husband and wife—meant to the people of early America, however, was much different from today. It was a time when Americans glorified marriage, which joined together husband and wife as a symbol of the bonds that held together the disparate aspects of republican society. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Americans considered marriage a microcosm of a larger world. It was...

In a divorce petition dated September 8, 1794, Elizabeth Sutter of Philadelphia charged her husband, James, with cruelty. She and James had been married for about twenty years, and, as Elizabeth related in her petition, he had treated her in an “affectionate manner” for most of that time. During the three years preceding her application for divorce, however, James had given himself up to “the intemperate use of spiritous Liquors,” abandoning her and their two children, neglecting to provide for them, and treating her badly.

In 1794, Elizabeth reached a level of desperation due to the “abusive and insolent Behaviour”...

“Even you My Brother … could not desire for a Husband one more perfectly formed to make me truly happy,” declared Harriet Chew Carroll in an 1801 letter to her brother, Benjamin Chew, Jr.² These words, written shortly after her marriage to Charles Carroll, expressed Harriet’s contentment with her husband and with her married state. With marriage she began a new phase of her life that involved moving from her home and family in Philadelphia to a new abode in Maryland with her husband. Despite this physical separation from her parents and siblings, however, she was happy. Harriet began marriage...

In December 1805, a distraught Jacob Collady confessed that he was unable to consummate his marriage “by having carnal knowledge … and performing the duty of a man towards his wife.”² Jacob’s shamed admission revealed his belief that he had failed as a husband. Behind that belief was the understanding that sexual relations between husband and wife were a fundamental aspect of marriage. Although discussions of sexual dysfunctions such as the Collady’s only occasionally appear in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Pennsylvania documents, they were certainly not the only married couple in early Pennsylvania to encounter sexual problems.

Both men and...

In the ideal marriage in the new republic there was no place for spouse abuse. Joined in an affectionate union, the married couples of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature discussed their differences. Husbands explained their arguments with logic and patience, while wives attempted to persuade their husbands by good example and moral certainties, but submitted to their requests if they could not.¹ Of course, in reality marriages did not always work that way, and anger and violence did occur between wife and husband. Both the law and the community recognized that in some cases not even the gentlest and most...

When Hugh Smith placed an advertisement in the 1754Pennsylvania Gazettenoting that his wife, Ann, had “elop’d from him,” he declared that she lived “in a very disorderly manner.” In a 1785 notice, John Hall stated that his wife Ann, had “absconded from his bed and board, and otherwise misbehaved herself,” and John Kennard asserted in 1743 that his wife Margaret “does unjustly elope from her said Husband and perhaps may run me in Debt.”¹ Philip Schurtz’s advertisement placed in 1744 also noted that he would not pay his wife’s debts. Anne Elizabeth Schurtz, however, had some foresight. Before...

Divorce did not always settle tensions between married couples. In fact, sometimes it caused new stresses or increased old ones. Martha Tiffin, for instance, received a divorce from bed and board from her husband, James, in December 1802. The following September, the court determined the alimony. From the beginning, James fought against paying it. He said he was in debt, and blamed Martha for it, declaring that “aspersions she threw on his character” caused his business as a hat vender to decline. Yet the men who examined his books asserted that they were kept “in the deranged state [in which]...

If marriage can be compared to a woven fabric, then this work is a study of how that cloth was woven in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Pennsylvania and what conditions made it unravel. This examination of marital discord reveals a picture of discontentment caused both by evolving societal expectations and by distinctions between how husbands and wives viewed marriage. Changes in American society between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries promoted and spread a view of marriage as “companionate,” where husband and wife were loving partners who shared in making important decisions. The older tradition of marriage as a patriarchal...