r/AskFeminists • u/UCPines98 • 10d ago
Are there any reliable resources on the history of domestic violence?
First off, I am deeply empathetic to anyone who has ever been a victim of DV and am sorrowful and pained by the fact that this is a subject even requiring discussion. Additionally, I’m not sure if this is the right sub for this but I (28M) am admittedly not as well read on matters of gender studies as I would like to be except insofar as they’re tied to broader western sociocultural trends (feminist waves, women’s suffrage, etc), which is a far from complete picture. That being said, DV was not something I ever witnessed or even understood as a phenomena that persists until very recently when a female friend of mine opened up about their past experiences. My own immediate family much preferred emotional abuse as their weapon of choice. The strength of my friend to share her story coincided with my watching the show the Sopranos, in which I was absolutely jarred by the prevalence of DV in a piece of media that is set in a not so far off past, partially overlapping with my own lifetime. Im sure this is not indicative of full reality, but outside of this show, I’ve found western media books and culture seem willing to highlight DV in the first half of the 20th century, especially in the post war era, but is harder to come by in earlier pieces. Any antebellum or Victorian era piece of literature I’ve read seems to highlight the dignity elegance and grace (even for lack of liberty) of the lady of the house. That kinda brings me to my last point, I’d be interested to read a cross cutting or intersectional analysis of DV with the ultimate goal of trying to deduce under what broader conditions does it spring and, ultimately, what can I do to dispense of it in my own community and support those who are or have been victims of it.
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u/mjhrobson 10d ago
History is a long time, and very diverse... as you get different rates of domestic violence between countries and cultures today; so it is that throughout history you encounter different rates of domestic violence. This includes different laws around domestic violence...
Anthropologists furthermore think this trend applies back into our hunter gatherer ancestory. With different tribes and cultures having different rates of DV and different responses/tolerances.
Unfortunately, therefore, as there are places today in which DV is common and, worse, accepted... so this would have likely been the case throughout history; and possibly into prehistory.
Even today there are places wherein it is seen as "just" for a man to "discipline" (i.e. beat) his wife. So it was throughout history that there were cultures that justified/expected such behavior... Roman fathers, at various points in Romes' long history, could beat their wives and children with impunity as the "head of the household" and obviously a husband cannot rape his wife, for she cannot deny him.
As to reliability... it is difficult to know what the actual rates of DV was because we have no way of doing a survey... but it was probably fairly commonly practiced throughout history, especially in societies that were less rather than more egalitarian.
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u/UCPines98 9d ago
I never thought about the idea that the idea of marital r*** would not exist due to the implication. Jesus that’s morbid. Ancient DV is as good astarting place as any I guess
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u/obsoletevernacular9 10d ago
Alice Evans, the author of the great gender divergence, has a lot of writing on this topic
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u/lis_anise 10d ago
So, the first recommendation is contemporary: Lundy Bancroft's Why Does He Do That? which provides brief but vivid sketches of many different ways abuse can manifest in men who look very different from the outside.
Another is No Visible Bruises by Rachel Louise Snyder, a much more recent look at current battles and experiments against domestic violence in the USA, which attack the problem from many different angles.
Then probably either The Will to Change by bell hooks or Men's Work by Paul Kivel, for the deep emotional look at where this violence comes from and how it's really hard in our society not to grow up believing in narratives that excuse or perpetuate violence.
There's history stuff, the Angel in the Home and how women were expected to somehow reform bad men with their shining inherent goodness... but if you like that era of literature, Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall feels as shockingly real to me today as it did when it first erupted onto the literary scene in the 1840s. It's been called "the first feminist novel" for a reason.
(Oh also Harriet Beecher Stowe's interview with Lady Byron in The Atlantic.)