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Record W2326671350 · doi:10.2307/4486098

Stray Wives: Marital Conflict in Early National New England

2006· article· en· W2326671350 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Gloria L. Main

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of American History · 2006
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicHistorical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsProbateNewspaperQuarter (Canadian coin)DebtWifeSpouseDemographic economicsCriminologyPolitical scienceHistorySociologyLawBusinessEconomics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

“Early national” here means 1790 to 1830, and “New England” is represented by Hartford County, Connecticut; Windsor County, Vermont; and occasionally all of Vermont. Mary Beth Sievens uses desertion notices in newspapers and divorce cases to explore the condition of married women in a period she characterizes as one of unusual economic and social change. Most of the notices were inserted by husbands as public warnings that they would no longer be responsible for their wives' debts. Many describe wives' ill behavior as reason for withdrawing their credit. A few notices came from women, mostly in defense of their character and actions. Sievens asks why so few wives responded to their husbands' notices. Her answer is that their audiences differed. Wives needed only to reassure their friends, kin, and neighbors, whereas husbands needed to alert existing and potential creditors beyond the immediate locale. Sievens uses a variety of public records— census, tax, probate, divorce, and birth records—to find out what happened to partners in a subsample of couples posting elopement notices from 1790 to 1830. Of those for whom she was able to obtain the necessary information, roughly equal proportions reconciled and divorced, although more than a quarter remained legally separated. Older couples were more likely to reconcile than were younger couples. Sievens believes that older wives were economically and socially more dependent on their husbands and therefore less free to decline to return. Of those divorcing, very few women remarried, whereas Vermont men were much more likely to do so. More than two-thirds of her divorcées petitioned on the grounds of desertion, but close to half in Vermont also complained of “intolerable severity,” grounds that were less likely to win in the more conservative state of Connecticut (p. 104). Interestingly, minor children more often lived with their mothers than with their fathers, few of whom actively sought custody.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.508
Threshold uncertainty score0.990

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0060.001
Scholarly communication0.0020.002
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.052
GPT teacher head0.247
Teacher spread0.195 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2006
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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Same venueJournal of American HistorySame topicHistorical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal ChangesFrench-language works237,207