The Women Who Took a Stand: A Look at Domestic Violence During Women’s History Month

History Helps Us to Understand the Challenge of Ending Domestic Violence

Laws permitting husbands to beat their wives began as early as 753 BC when The Laws of Chastisement condoned wife-beating with a rod or switch so long as its circumference was no greater than the girth of the base of a man’s right thumb. This is where the phrase, “The Rule of Thumb,” comes from. By 1200 AD, the church fueled the fire by endorsing wife-beating as a “loving” way for a husband to correct his wife. A hundred years later in its Rules of Marriage, the Catholic Church encouraged husbands to beat their wives out of concern (and “not rage”) both for his benefit and her “spiritual good.” So, the framework for sustaining and encouraging domestic violence against women was set. And it remained in place for centuries. In fact, we see more than remnants of this ideology supporting the cultural blinders that many perpetrators use to justify abuse and others use to support Double Abuse as a means to minimize or ignore the severity of abuse.

It took another 300 years before it came to be known, at least within Europe, that a battered wife might find confidential shelter from their abuser if they were fortunate enough to encounter a compassionate nun willing to risk the danger of housing the abused woman in their convent. Publicly, however, domestic violence against women continued to be endorsed and by 1767, the “Rule of Thumb” became part of British common law. So while there was a potential safe haven for those victims lucky enough to find refuge in a convent, other victims were left to the mercy of their husbands without recourse.

In the United States, it was legal for a husband to physically abuse his wife in every State until 1871 when Alabama and Massachusetts both declared wife-beating illegal. But the laws didn’t arise in many other states until much later and didn’t have any real teeth for another ten years when Maryland finally imposed legal consequences – physical punishment of 40 lashes or being jailed for a year – for men who were convicted of wife-beating. Twenty years later efforts to allow wives to seek recompense for injury from domestic violence were rejected when the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its decision in 1910, Thompson v. Thompson, 218 U.S. 611, denying victims the right to charge their husbands with assault and battery, limiting any redress to the criminal courts. In ruling this way, the Court centered its concern on the fear that allowing such claims would “open the doors of the courts to accusations of all sorts of one spouse against another.” So, they closed the door and this became the law of the land within the U.S. 

Today, there is no uniformity of state laws regarding domestic violence. Only 38 states have definitions of domestic violence and penalties within their criminal codes, although every state places the definition within its domestic relations or social services codes. The definition itself varies among the states. Some include stalking or harassment within the definition. A few include intimidation or emotional abuse as domestic violence. While other states incorporate child witnessing of domestic violence as a part of the overall definition in varying degrees. The federal government attempted to uniformly address domestic violence within the Violence Against Women Act, (VAWA) passed in 1994, which Act was renewed repeatedly up until 2018 when it failed to renew. This law created new rights for victims of domestic violence along with funding eligibility, grants, and monies made available for many prevention efforts, education, legal representation and shelters for all victims of domestic violence. It also created new criminal offenses for acts of domestic violence that cross state lines. Whether the revised or an amended version of the VAWA will be approved is currently under debate.