A short presentation on the 19th-century stereotype of the working-class wife-beater. It asks why this developed, what defined the stereotype, and considers its links to the industrial revoltuion, to regional working identiteis, and to ideas about manliness.

1. From ‘kicking districts’ to Andy
Capp: wife-beating and working-
class masculinities
Crime and Legal History Research
Group, (5 March 2014)
Dr Joanne Bailey, Oxford Brookes

2. Contemporary stereotypes of working-
class wife beaters
• Frances Power Cobbe deployed the link between working-
class men and marital violence in „Wife Torture in England‟
(1878)
• Lady Margaret Bell‟s At the Works (1907) an account of life
in the iron-working community of Middlesbrough, discussed
how often marital violence occurred:
▫ „Another woman whose husband was not a model of the conjugal
virtues said that, at any rate, she was thankful that he did not beat
her. Another said with pride, when relating the virtues of hers,
that he had never so much as laid a finger on her‟
• Thus Bell concluded that wife-beating was fairly widespread
among the working-classes.

3. Historians of marital violence in the
working classes
• Excellent work on violence in 19c working-class
marriage exists (e.g. Ellen Ross, John Carter-Wood,
Anne-Marie Hughes) but far less about the negative
stereotype of w-c wife beaters
• Court records and press reports show that there were
no class boundaries where violence against wives was
concerned, but, as Elizabeth Foyster shows in Marital
Violence in England , wife-beating was increasingly
perceived as class-based in the 19c:
▫ middle- and upper-class men identified with emotional
and mental abuse of their wives
▫ working-class men with extreme physical violence
• Why?

4. The power of stereotypes of working-
class wife-beaters
• Did „cultural‟ work- negative stereotyping functions through
„othering‟ as a means to form national, class and gender
identities
▫ Used to construct class-identity: middle-class men could use the stereotype
to construct themselves as different and superior types of manhood.
▫ Used by working men seeking to define themselves as respectable and worthy
citizens and thus gain the franchise
• Demonstrated a „civilising process‟ – that England was
progressive and modern by tackling this savage social problem
▫ Had racial and ethnic elements – for example Irish men were often identified
as wife-beaters.
▫ In the language of scientific Darwinism supposedly violent working-class
men labelled as uncivilised, primitive and brutish. Cobbe, referred to the evil
of „passion‟ which „rude men and savages share with many animals [and] …
consists in anger and cruelty‟.
• Shaped social investigators‟ thinking and formed part of their
rationale and motivation for surveillance and intervention in
poorer people‟s lives

5. Stereotypes of both spouses
• So far it is the stereotypes of
working-class victims of wife-
beating that have been
unpicked: 2 forms -
• Passive un-provoking wife
• Strident, provoking nag
• I will focus on the stereotypical
wife-beater using three broad
categories to raise interesting
questions:
industry, regionalism, and
masculinity.
• Objective – inspire research to
explore:
• When the stereotype began
• Its form
• Regional variation
• Its tenacity

6. (1) Industry & Wife-beating
• Wife-beaters often described as belonging to
specific categories of industrial worker-
▫ Cobbe identified them as „Colliers, “puddlers”, and
weavers‟
• Often jobs which symbolised heavy indstury that
were tagged to wife-beating: mills/mines/iron
working
• Particularly the manufacturing town that was
seen to constitute domestic and other forms of
violence
Cobbe naming „typical‟ areas for wife-torture

7. Industry & Wife-beating
• Cobbe deployed the cultural vocabulary of
industrialisation to explain the connection:
• What historians of marital violence need to know:
• Did these ideas start with industralisation?
• How extensive were they?
• Why do they have predominantly industrial
connotations?
• Was there a discourse of rural labouring wife-
beaters? (or is the idyllic counterpart?)

8. (2) Regionalism & Wife-beating
• Some degree of regionalism is also evident
• The industrial regions most firmly associated with brutal
working class marital violence were the North-West; the
North-East; and London
• For example, Cobbe used the Parliamentary Reports on brutal
assaults to estimate the proportion of wife-beaters to
population, concluding that London and Durham had the
highest number. The other places she included were
Liverpool, Lancashire, Stafford, and the West Riding of
Yorkshire
• My guess is that this spatial identification of stereotyped wife-
beating did not originate with her publication, but this needs
testing
• I want to suggest that it is possible to see how ingrained the
regional dimension was in the way that it came to be conveyed
through material culture

9. Hobnail Boots and Clogs
• Working shoes –
cheap, heavy, protective, durable – associated
with marital violence
• Kicking Districts identified by Cobbe, as
regions where men kicked their wives with their
clogs:
▫ A letter to the Editor in the Spectator, Dec 1877
complained of a series of northern men who had
killed their wives recently: such as „Alfred
Cummins, tailor, Moor Street [Blackburn], was
charged with knocking his wife down and kicking
her head and face so violently as to deprive her of
sight in one eye‟.
▫ 1874, article about epidemic of violence in the
north stated: „The Rough who kicks an inoffensive
passer-by to death, or who tramples, with his
hob-nailed boots, on the body of his senseless
wife, is often maddened with drink, but he is
never, or hardly ever, quite irresponsible‟.

10. Flat Caps and Andy Capp
• According to Eric Hobsbawm the flat cap
marked a proud working-class identity:
▫ the „headgear which virtually formed the badge of
class membership of the British proletarian when
not at work‟
• Perhaps it is not surprising the flat cap became
associated with the stereotype of wife-beating.

11. Andy Capp
• Hobsbawm claimed the
cartoon „gently‟ satirized
the traditional male
working-class culture of
the old industrial area of
Britain
• Surely a derogatory
vision of w-c? Won‟t
work [andicap], spends
money on leisure, fights
with Flo, beats her for
fun
• „Gentle‟ satire? First cartoon, 1957 British Cartoon
Archive, University of Kent

12. Cartoons sourced from British Cartoon
Archive, University of Kent, 4 Oct 1957, 24 Oct 1957
I‟m interested in the way that the flat cap could be both part of working-class self-
identity as well as a negative stereotype. Was this identification chronological, was it
class-specific‟ or did it overlap?

13. (3) Working-class Masculinities
• A. Manly Independence: the breadwinner
• A positive version of working-class masculine
identity was as breadwinner
• The working-class wife beater figure was
frequently the failed breadwinner – typically
described as either unemployed and/or lazy

14. (3) Working-class Masculinities
• A. Manly Independence: the breadwinner
• The wife-beater was also often the „rough‟
• I‟m interested in when this „rough‟
came into common discussion and was
associated with wife-beating. So Charles
Dickens‟ Bill Sykes has all its hallmarks
-beats Nancy to death – so the link was
in place in 1838.
• How far was it seen as a product of
industrial lives and conditions?
• London roughs often seen as unwaged
– so was this man also the failed
breadwinner?

15. (3) Working-class Masculinities
• B. Manly self-control
• A key features of manliness is
the control of passion – anger.
• Shaped ideas about working-
class men and wife-beating -
assumption that men were
marked by an inherent
tendency towards brutality and
inability to control themselves
• This Liverpool rough is seen as
unable to stop himself (by
permission of Punch Limited
ww.punch.co.uk)

16. (3) Working-class Masculinities
• B. Working-class men’s bodies
• Physical strength was how working men earned
a living (what they sold in the labour market) and
the way that they resolved disputes with other
men.
• Fist fights seen as reasonable, decent way to sort
out conflict between friends and co-workers.
• Was there tension between toleration of
employing physical strength in working and
leisure arenas, but not in domestic arenas?
• Did the stereotype help work through this
tension for men by insisting that it was not
possible to use violence in a restorative way
within the home?
• And what does that say about the timing of
society‟s tolerance of men‟s use of corrective
discipline against dependents?

17. Dissemination of the stereotype
• Some of the images of shocking marital violence
were made cute – like Punch & Judy which became
popular children‟s toys/entertainment.
• Andy Capp became a global phenomenon –
widespread in America and Europe: He‟s known as
Tuffa Viktor in Sweden, Charlie Kappl in Austria
and and Willi Wacker in Germany
• When the strip‟s cartoonist, Reg Smythe, died in
1998, the strip was syndicated to 1,700 newspapers
– 1,000 in America alone – translated into 14
languages and read by a combined audience of 250
million people in 52 countries round the world
http://www.planetslade.com/andy-capp-reg-
smythe-v3.html

18. In conclusion: a final question
• When did the stereotype end?
• De-industrialisation?
Is this trajectory shown in Reg Smythe‟s Andy Capp cartoon?
In its early version from 1957– numerous wife-beating references. According
to a fan‟s site: „Andy continued to treat Flo badly well into the 1970s – he was
still giving her black eyes as late as 1975 – but by then it was very much a
battle of equals. Often, Flo is as eager to get her dukes up as Andy, and will
agree to fight him for reasons as trivial as warming him up before a pub brawl
(1966), trying to get his watch started (1968) or simply to help him relax
(1971‟). There were only three Andy-on-Flo violence between 1976 and 1990 –
while there are a dozen that show Flo punching Andy off his feet.
http://www.planetslade.com/andy-capp-reg-smythe-v3.html.