Escaping Matrimony

This study is a collection of elopement advertisements printed in newspapers throughout British North America.

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Escaping Matrimony is a documentary history of hundreds of husbands and wives who ran away from one another over the course of the eighteenth-century. In this collection of elopement advertisements, men and women protested marriage, challenged coverture, and declared themselves independent and free. In an endeavor to discredit and intimidated their spouses, husbands and wives used early American newspapers to achieved at once voice and agency in a complex world that would have preferred that they endured unnoticed and in silence.