This paper suggests some new ways of investigating the history of domestic violence.

1. ‘Pandora’s Box’
Suggestions for
new approaches to
studying the
history of
domestic violence
Professor Joanne Bailey
Oxford Brookes University
A Wonder Book For Girls & Boys,
designs By Walter Crane. c1892.
Pandora wonders at the box

2. A Wonder Book For
Girls & Boys, designs
By Walter Crane.
c1892.
Pandora opens the box
Opening up cultures of violence
• I propose that historians think about the history of
domestic violence in new ways by actively exploring its
various cultures.
• I liken this to opening up Pandora’s box, for several reasons:
• The allusion captures a culture of victim blaming – or if that
is avoided, a focus on the victim rather than the perpetrator
– for it is Pandora who is identified as the cause of all the
miseries escaping into the world, rather than Prometheus
whose act of stealing fire from Mount Olympus led to
Pandora being given the jar, or, indeed, Zeus who
engineered it all.
• Also, Pandora’s box is a metaphor for the inherent problems
raised in studying domestic violence – essentially, it is
difficult to research and to talk about. The subject leads to
heated - visceral – responses.
• And, finally, Pandora did not allow hope to escape the box –
and I trust I do not press my analogy too far here to
observe that researching new lines of enquiry allows some
hope that learning more about the cultures of domestic
violence will arm societies to deal with it more effectively.

3. Clarifying terms and scope
• My focus is upon female victims in Britain
• I realise men are victims of domestic violence too. For the
sake of clarity and brevity, however, I am not going to explore
this – although it does need more research - and I will focus
on violence against women.
• I prefer to use the term ‘cruelty’ rather than ‘wife-beating’ for
the period before the later 19th c to convey the ambiguities
underlying an act which in some form was permitted in law
until c 1891. ‘Cruelty’ defines where discipline becomes
violence
• ‘Marital violence’ – between spouses
• ‘Domestic violence’ – against wives, children, household-
dependents (including adult men in some periods)

4. Scholarship on the history of
domestic violence
• Historical research into marital violence has been underway long
enough for a couple of shifts to be identifiable in approach and
findings.
• Pioneering work in the 1970-80s driven by historians of women and
feminist historians, as well as crime historians, brought the history
of marital violence under scrutiny and established it was worth
exploring.
• One of the aims of this research agenda was to measure the
incidence of marital violence and how that impacted on marital
relationships.
• Another was that it would illuminate how far patriarchal society
oppressed women – since the majority of physical marital violence
is enacted against women.
• This excellent groundwork tended to see married life in general as
profoundly influenced by the potential for domestic violence.

5. Social history
• In the 1980s social historians turned to court records –
particularly from the Church Courts – to explore social and
marital relationships.
• Sensitive to crime historians’ recognition that a ‘dark figure’ of
offence existed, these historians moved away from trying to
measure the frequency of marital violence.
• Collectively their work demonstrated the complexities of
patriarchal relationships - each directed attention at the potential
gap between theoretically hierarchical relationships and their
lived counterparts.
• This led to the first shift in ideas about marital violence because
this work showed that it is problematic to assume that patriarchy
expedited violence. After all, strong-minded, strong-willed wives
were admired and tyrannical husbands condemned.
• Also, Amussen and Clarke historicised ideas about correction by
suggesting that they mirrored those about state punishment.
Broadly speaking, when the state used corporal punishment to
discipline offenders, it was acceptable for men to correct their
wives using measured corporal punishment. This fitted well with
theories about an overarching civilising process.

6. Gender history
• The next paradigm shift – later 1990s-2000s – was
shaped by gender history. Laura Gowing, Margaret
Hunt, me, and Elizabeth Foyster investigated the
gendered dynamics of marital relationships. Alex
Shepard’s and John Tosh’s work on manhood shed
further light by showing that many men could not
achieve patriarchal manhood, and indeed men’s
roles as husbands could be vulnerable.
• This stage opened up the possibility that marital
violence was not a straightforward act of dominance,
but one of weakness.
• Secondly, scholars no longer took at face value the
law of chastisement, which allowed men to correct
disobedient wives, and tried to establish what
contemporaries meant by correction and discipline.
• The consensus now is that wives did not expect to be
beaten, and that society did not tolerate male
violence towards wives.

7. Current views
• The extent to which society accepted correction, however, remains
uncertain – and the spectrum of behaviour from correction to cruelty is
not fully delineated or the distinctions between them clarified.
• This too is starting to be addressed in a much more nuanced way. There is
valuable work on the medieval period, for instance, by Sara Butler and
Hannah Skoda, from the end of the 16c to the mid 19c by Prof Loreen
Giese and me, and by Anne-Marie Hughes on marital violence in the post-
criminalisation period. All explore the types of acts committed by
perpetrators and how far they were considered violent.
• Thirdly the research breaks down from the standard narrative of a
civilising process for it looks as if societies have long held a range of views
on what acts were acceptable.
• I want to argue in the rest of the paper that there is still a great deal we
don’t know and suggest some ways to reinvigorate this research.

8. Suggestion 1: big data … and
marital violence
• In recent decades scholars have steered away from trying to find the ‘big
picture’ of the social history of marital violence – i.e. number of
prosecuted cases - because of the limitations imposed by legal definitions
of what constituted cruelty against wives.
• I think it is time, however, to attempt a big-picture cultural history of
domestic violence.
• This would entail, with suitable funding, the compilation of masses of
data. James Grossman describes "Big Data" in American Historical
Association 2012 as ‘the zillions of pieces of information that traverse the
internet, flowing across the full range of human and nonhuman activity’.
• Why is Big Data a way forward? Because, as Tim Hitchcock points out, with
big data: ‘Suddenly, all the joys of datamining, corpus linguistics,
textmining, of network analysis and interactive visualisations beckon...’

9. See Tim Hitchcock’s online paper for info:
http://www.historyworkingpapers.org/?page_id=266
big data … and marital violence
• Recently there have been
specific calls for gender history
to head in the direction of big
data as it is lagging behind in
such initiatives.
• This is certainly the case with
marital violence. First and
foremost, digitised sources
have not really been used to
their full advantage. Yet
keyword searching on various
phrases even at the most
rudimentary level is extremely
telling.

10. Plotting the term ‘wifebeating’

11. • Text-mining concepts of disobedience, provocation, and slavery would all pay dividends too.
• How about charting the adjectives and nouns that are used in describing marital violence and
perpetrators: cruel, mad, tyrant – do they differ across different genres, trial transcripts etc.
• What does that tell us about changing understandings of marital violence?
Plotting the term ‘cruelty’

12. • Big Data is no easy route. As Grossman goes on to explain in the AHA: ‘But (and this
is what matters to historians): the data are useless until we have them organized
into conceptual frameworks able to answer useful questions’.
• And so we also need the projects to be interdisciplinary and multi-researcher led –
combinations of historians, social scientists, statisticians, computer scientists. Still, if
this project is not worthy of serious funding, I don’t know what is!
Word Cloud from a cruelty separation case

13. Suggestion 2: Material culture …
and marital violence
• My next suggestion appears to be at an altogether more intimate scale at
first glance, but would probably also benefit from fairly large scale data –
i.e. thinking about objects and spaces.
• With the material ‘turn’ in history we are increasingly aware that spaces
and objects are central to the way people and societies behave and
conceptualise their worlds.
• The spatial turn in crime history is very helpful and could be applied to
marital violence.
• A version of this could be adapted for the – admittedly - less amenable
data and location of domestic violence. It would be interesting to know
whether prosecutions for marital violence, for instance, clustered in
particular areas – which would tell us something about the reporting and
policing of violence in the home.
• Also –it would be great to see areas other than London selected for such
enquiry? The capacity for comparative analysis would be fantastic.
•

14. 2000 homicides from OBP, female victim, male defendant, 1674-1819
mapped onto a 1746 map of London, Locating London’s Past
http://www.locatinglondon.org/index.html
• Ongoing work using GIS to map criminal prosecutions onto streets and regions.
• Here is the marvellous Locating London’s Past, which is freely available and allows
you to map OBP data onto a 1746 map.

15. Material culture … and marital
violence - space
• Another possibility is to look at how violence was articulated in and
around particular places, spaces and objects. John Carter Wood’s work
on 19th century violence used spatial analysis to conclude that space
constituted violence – w-c urban domestic environments: poor quality,
overcrowded, overlooked buildings created and maintained it.
• A few years ago I attempted to think about the locations of marital
violence with an article mapping where cruel acts took place, as
described in 50 or so separation cases on the grounds of cruelty and 90
odd trials for wife-killing reported in the OBP in the long 18th c.
• I established that marital violence was extremely fluid, and though
shaped by the spaces in which it occurred, it was not confined within
them and crucially it did not conform to the supposed move behind
closed doors. This was done without qualitative research software and
could be developed much further with it.
• More data would enable us to look across time – easier when homes
are bigger and there was more specialised room use - and ask if there
were spatial internal/external hotspots for domestic violence.
Bedrooms – staircases – kitchens – stables AND WHY

16. How does space constitute marital violence?
Thomas Rowlandson, Ragfair, Rosemary Lane, n.d., late eighteenth century.
British Museum, Binyon 44, Crace XX.188. © Trustees of the British Museum

17. Material culture … and marital
violence - objects
• An valuable approach would be to compile accounts of marital and/or
domestic violence to establish what objects were associated with it,
encompassing correction, cruelty, and abuse – both imagined [eg ballads
and songs, jokes] and empirical [court records, autobiographies, press].
Do tensions arise within or around specific objects? I did
some work on the marital bed in terms of material
culture with Dr Angela McShane at the V&A – what was
clear was that while the bed was a site of life-cycle
rituals related to marriage and family - childbed, sickbed,
deathbed, it was also a site of potential marital tension.
Marital violence was often initiated in or around beds.
Was it because sex caused conflict? If we think more
about the object itself, we can historicise a little more -
the early modern bed was a closed space in which
marital conversation was encouraged. It would be
fascinating to trace this in more modern times as more
specialised bed chambers developed.
The two poles on the bed
are ‘bed staffs’ – and in one
late 17thc case I’ve seen
the husband used it as a
weapon against his wife.

18. Material culture … and marital
violence - objects
• I surveyed the cases of marital violence that I have collected
from Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire, Oxfordshire,
Buckinghamshire and London in the long 18th c to see what
objects were used in the enactment of violence – alongside
fists and feet.
• They include: bed staff, wooden charger, tankard, poker,
burning coals, lit candelabra, sword, pistol, and the most
peculiar – a bull’s pizzle (dried bull’s penis!).

19. Material culture … and marital
violence - objects
• This diversity of objects, tells us something about the
physicality of domestic violence – as well as its legitimacy or
lack of it:
• Its location, timing – morning/bed-time/meal times
• The meaning of correction and cruelty: formal – informal;
legitimate – illegitimate
• Planned - spontaneous

20. Material culture … and marital
violence - objects
• This approach also helps us in terms of the culture
of violence – for it helps to uncover whether any
particular objects were firmly associated with
marital violence in popular culture.
• One of the objects which we think was – the stick
– would be interesting to explore. It is central to
the supposed concept of the ‘rule of thumb’ – that
a man could legitimately beat his wife with stick
no bigger than thumb.
• Very ambiguous – Maeve Doggett couldn’t trace it
in legislation or legal comment, yet this cartoon
points to a very solid familiarity with the concept –
so perhaps there is a linguistic trace out there?
• This would offer an innovative material/linguistic
methodology to explore links between legal and
judicial attitudes and lay attitudes – building up a
layered view of the cultures of domestic violence.

21. Suggestion 3: Emotions history …
and marital violence
• Although a history of emotions approach is being taken up
increasingly in several related fields, it is only beginning to
be undertaken where intimate violence is concerned and
there is a lot of scope for exciting work.
• There are several ways in which a history of emotions
approach is relevant.
• One is influenced by Barbara Rosenwein’s work - for her
concept of ‘emotional communities’ can be applied here.
She defines them as “social groups that adhere to the same
valuations of emotions and how they should be expressed”
• Clearly, the law, litigation and the juridical process made up
one emotional community. What part did - the judges’ and
lawyers’ feelings play in the

22. Emotions history … and marital
violence
• Think of Thomas Erskine, who was famed for his weeping
and deploying feeling language to persuade the jury,
perhaps most obviously in crim.com [adultery] cases - to
realise the power of this legal strategy for litigants,
prosecutors and defendants.
• Thomas Dixon has shown that Justice Willes cried when
presiding over capital cases in the 1850s and '60s and
historicised the ways in which these tears were
interpreted. Click here for the article:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13555502.2011.611696#.Uzw6CVeBWZk
• There was change over time, for by the time of his suicide
in 1872 such displays were no longer acceptable.
• Dixon has also looked at the performance of courtroom
emotions as modes of control. His survey of Victorian
divorce cases leads him to suggest that official [legal]
regimes of emotion came ‘into contact with, and tried to
classify and control, the feelings associated with everyday
life in general and with marital relations in particular’.
Thomas Erskine 1st
Baron Erskine
Justice James Shaw Willes

23. Emotions history … and marital
violence
• Of great interest to me is whether there were different emotional communities –
court, print, family – and how these were manifested were marital violence was
concerned.
• For litigants and witnesses also expressed emotions before the courts – and in the
correspondence with their lawyers/proctors. Did they exercise dissimilar
emotional standards where marital or domestic violence was concerned? Did this
lead to conflict/misunderstandings?
Just look at the feelings displayed in
this image from the well known series
by Cruickshank – The Bottle.

24. Emotions history … and marital
violence
• In court records the words of plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses report
and convey emotions such as: fear, anxiety, anger, pain, disgust, guilt, love.
• Indeed, one of the ways to demonstrate the grounds of cruelty when
seeking separation was to show that a wife could not live her life due to
fear.
• Elizabeth Foyster explored the feelings associated with marital cruelty
some time ago in a great article that has not since been followed up.
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=4188424
• She showed that during the Georgian period of politeness and sensibility a
husband’s impact on his wife’s feelings and nerves might be taken account
of by the church courts, particularly where genteel couples were
concerned. This was well before mental cruelty was accepted as grounds
for separation. We really need to know more about the emotions
associated with spousal cruelty and how they shift over time and space in
other emotional regimes.

25. Emotions history … and marital
violence
• Image of husbands as violently angry are
not unusual. Also fearful wives. But we can
do more than take them at face value.
• What were such emotions meant to
provoke in the reader or the viewer, and
how do they relate to other factors like
gender, class, and race?
• Also these meanings interacted with the
protagonists in domestic violence who
faced restrictions in how far they could
express or not express emotions where
correction, cruelty, and violence in
marriage and the family were concerned.

26. Emotions history … and marital
violence
• Wives were expected to exercise stoicism – a form
of emotional restraint - especially 19thc working-
class women. Did genteel women have more or less
scope to express distress?
• Research indicates that men have usually been
required to control anger and early modern
husbands were advised to correct their wives
without rage. I think there is evidence that the
control of anger lies behind the frequent criticism
of men accused of marital violence as mad.
• Historians who work on marital cruelty from at
least the 16th to 20th centuries have remarked on
this, but thinking about it in terms of emotions is
hardly done. Did descriptions modify as medical
definitions of madness changed? Did it serve any
purpose in court? What implications did it have for
the men inside and outside the court? Did
perpetrators display the ‘right’ kind of anger?

27. Suggestion 4: the longue durée …
and marital violence
• There is enough work now on marital violence from the medieval to modern eras,
across Europe and North America, to construct a sense of how the culture of
violence against women, children, and in some cases men in the family, has
changed over time and space.
• One approach is to trace the role of marital violence in political rhetoric. Anna
Clark has carried out insightful work into politically radical groups who used men’s
behaviour as husbands to promote their political ideology and gain it
respectability.
• It would be worth this approach extending back in time. For example, The
hardships of the English laws in relation to wives, 1735, took a recent case of
cruelty and used it to show that wives were in a worse condition than slaves.
• And, of course, as the slides show, there were a number of visual images of marital
violence from satire, to cartoons, to illustrations of published cases in the press
and periodicals.

28. http://liberalconspiracy.org/2013/05/29/facebook-admits-mistake-over-
offensive-images-on-violence-against-women-after-campaign/
http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201305222040-0022771
closer historical scrutiny of misogynistic uses of wife-beating across long time
periods would help us to understand the culture of marital violence

29. Conclusion
• In conclusion, my aim in this paper is to inspire more scholars to look again at
domestic violence in all its forms.
• We need a raft of scholarship which speaks to a new generation’s concerns and
research agendas. I habitually dismiss the oft stated ambition of those who wish to
find lessons in the past to solve present ills, since there is generally too much
social, economic, political and cultural specificity that makes this an empty hope.
• However, I make an exception for domestic violence. For we live in a society in
which women are victimised. If you watch TV dramas, or read detective fiction,
look at Facebook ads, you’ll know that it is typically women who are the imagined
victims of crime.
• Indeed, ironically, 21st century society’s obsession where the culture of violence is
concerned is with serial killers. But, as most of you will know, the real threat to
women is far closer to home.
• According to Women’s Aid, on average two women are killed by their husbands or
partners every week. Cited by Women’s Aid, 2007
http://www.womensaid.org.uk/domestic_violence_topic.asp?section=0001000100
220036
• Let’s find out more?