Domestic Violence

Domestic Violence. In the late twentieth century, a revived feminist movement forced “domestic violence” into public view. Previously called “wife‐beating,” the newer, somewhat oblique term reflected the understanding that many victims are not wives but girlfriends, and very occasionally husbands or boyfriends. “Domestic violence” consists primarily of violence against women.

Inasmuch as male domination appears virtually universal in human history, violence against women has probably been equally universal. In most patriarchal societies, husbands were customarily entitled to “chastise” their wives, although women resisted what they considered unacceptable levels of violence. But until the birth of modern feminism, a woman's defenses were limited to whatever personal resistance she could mount with the help of kinfolk. Feminists initially approached the problem circuitously and euphemistically, calculating that a frontal attack on this male privilege would elicit a backlash. In the United States, women activists began even before the creation of a women's rights movement to embed criticism of male violence in the temperance crusade, using the battered woman as the archetypical victim of the drunkard and rendering drinking a gendered (male) vice. By the mid–nineteenth century, feminists were invoking domestic violence as an argument for divorce and maternal custody of children. In the 1870s women reformers organized a movement against child abuse, again highlighting male violence. Mothers often reported their husbands to the new anti–child abuse societies to draw attention to their own victimization, advancing the then novel idea that violence against women harmed children; this campaign helped deflate the Victorian romanticism about the family that veiled it from investigation.

The leaders of these campaigns were mainly elite and white, but less privileged women also resisted violence against women. In the 1890s African American leader Ida B. Wells‐Barnett inaugurated her crusade against lynching by challenging white southern lies about black men's rapes of white women. Wells‐Barnett publicized instead the widespread real rape of black women by white men. At the same time, employed, mainly poor, women protested workplace abuse, ranging from harassment to rape.

A major advance in public policy against domestic violence, however inadvertent, was Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), a part of the Social Security Act of 1935. ADC (later AFDC) offered battered women economic help if they left abusive men. Battered‐women's advocates generally considered the repeal of AFDC in 1996 a setback for the cause of stopping domestic violence.

In the 1970s a revived women's movement challenged domestic violence directly. Demanding prosecution of batterers and founding battered‐women's shelters, activists argued that domestic violence was not only a personal but also a social and even a political practice that contributed to subordinating all women. By the late twentieth century, the overwhelming majority of Americans believed that nothing justifies domestic violence. As if to symbolize these achievements, President Bill Clinton in 1994 established for the first time a Violence against Women Office in the Justice Department.
See also Family; Gender; Marriage and Divorce; Temperance and Prohibition.

Bibliography

Elizabeth Pleck , Domestic Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present, 1987.
Linda Gordon , Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, 1988.

Linda Gordon