"When Poverty Comes In the Door, Love Flies Out the Window": Emotion and the Family Economy British North America

The quote in the title of the paper comes from a 1796 warning from Richard Lloyd to his nephew and ward. Lloyd encapsulated recommendations that had been made more often more delicately but no less forcefully to young people for decades – and would be repeated for decades after. These warnings highlight an apparent contradiction in historians’ conclusions about marriage in the eighteenth century. In the one lane, historians have found a profound shift towards companionate marriage in the eighteenth century; in another, they have tracked the legal effects and evolution of married women’s legal and financial rights. This project merges these approaches to argue that, despite the growing emphasis on emotion, most eighteenth-century British North Americans argued that financial stability was a precondition of marital happiness. Drawing on correspondence and financial records from several colonies/states, I demonstrate that elite families in British North America carefully considered the allocation of property to their children. Wealthy families with property in multiple colonies/states routinely exploited the varying protections different legal regimes offered women’s property as they sought to lay the financial foundations for new household and establish a secure financial legacy for the next generation. In analyzing families as simultaneously economic and emotional, I flesh out the critical financial functions of marriage – often treated as private and non-economic.