Any views expressed within media held on this service are those of the contributors, should not be taken as approved or endorsed by the University, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University in respect of any particular issue.
Press "Enter" to skip to content

Women’s Violence Against Men in 19th-Century North America

Earlier this year, L.S.U. Press published Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America by Robin C. Sager. The blurb for what is obviously an important and interesting book states: “Sager’s findings also challenge historical literature’s assumptions about the regional influences on violence, showing that married southerners were no more or less violent than their midwestern counterparts. Her work reveals how definitions and perceptions of cruelty varied according to the gender of victim and perpetrator. Correcting historical mischaracterizations of women’s violence as trivial, rare, or defensive, Sager finds antebellum wives both capable and willing to commit a wide variety of cruelties within their marriages.”

While not attempting to minimise the horror or significance of marital violence, it reminded your blogger of a pencil drawing inside his copy of Kent’s Commentaries on American Law, the eighth edition of 1854, a copy that had spent much of its life in the USA, being sold at one stage by Dixon, a law publisher and bookseller on Walnut Street, Philadelphia. On page 104 of volume II, Kent writes: “but the English ecclesiastical law makes no such distinction, and divorces are granted, on a bill by the husband, for cruel usage by the wife”. Kent provides a footnote to a case in Haggard’s Consistorial Reports. A 19th-century reader has added another footnote by an asterisk, the footnote consisting of a pencil drawing of a woman brandishing a typically North American broom, at a cowering man. Though in modern eyes, an image that essentially mocks women or “hen-pecked” husbands in a way we find uncomfortable, it is revealing about the social attitudes of the day.

kent-image

Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.

css.php

Report this page

To report inappropriate content on this page, please use the form below. Upon receiving your report, we will be in touch as per the Take Down Policy of the service.

Please note that personal data collected through this form is used and stored for the purposes of processing this report and communication with you.

If you are unable to report a concern about content via this form please contact the Service Owner.

Please enter an email address you wish to be contacted on. Please describe the unacceptable content in sufficient detail to allow us to locate it, and why you consider it to be unacceptable.
By submitting this report, you accept that it is accurate and that fraudulent or nuisance complaints may result in action by the University.

  Cancel