One of the themes that emerges from the individiaul biographies in this book is that the "female husband" phenomenon was primarily associated with working class people. (There are a few exceptions, such as Mary Diana Dods, as well as those who transed gender without marrying, which includes a few more examples of professional-class people.) On the one hand, the types of occupations these "female husbands" had challenged myths about gendered abilities even more strongly than middle-class professions would have. Myths that rarely took into account the physicality of many female-coded professions in pre-industrial times. But the social context also came with attitudes and prejudices common to working class communities.
The husband held social--as well as legal--power over the wife, and systems were designed to support that power. Husbands who employed financial, emotional, or physical abuse within the home were rarely held to account, as long as they didn't "go too far." A willingness to disrupt gender expectations on a personal basis didn't mean that someone held progressive ideas about gender equality on a more general level. And to the extent that performance of gender expectations may have been essential to their success, they may have had incentives to embrace male sterotypes.
Their wives, as Manion notes, were in a contradictory position. Assuming that they were aware of their husband's assigned gender, they held a unique power in the relationship. The wife was the "normal" one, not the transgressive one. She could present herself as naive, or as tricked, but there were no legal consequences looming over her. Except, of course, the consequences of suddenly becoming an unmarried woman--indeed, perhaps treated as a never-married woman--in a society that disadvantaged unmarried women. And, of course, there was love. Again assuming that she went into the relationship with full knowledge, there must have been some degree of affection or camraderie that made the marriage attractive, despite the hazards of discovery. That, too, might make her hesitant to use the power of her knowledge, regardless of provocation.
But overall, these stories point out the variety and ordinariness of the people involved in "female husband" marriages. If some of them behaved badly (on either side), others lived the quiet, ordinary lives that their friends and neighbors described to sensation-seeking journalists after the fact. For every "female husband" whose story ended up in the news, we can know that there were many who never had the misfortune of public exposure. We see glimpses of them between the lines, as in Henry Stoak's second marriage where evidently the community was well aware that someone once known as Harriet, and once outed in the context of a divorce, was living among them as a happily married man--and nobody thought it was their business to do anything about it. Now there's a story prompt.
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