1Intra-marital violence is a subject often examined by sociologists, psychologists and historians alike, albeit from a very traditional perspective. Certainly, the image of the ’battered wife’ is a common one when discussions of domestic aggression arise or literature on the subject is produced. What though, of the ’battered husband’? Evidence from early nineteenth century Scottish and English church and court records suggest that abusive behaviour by wives against their husbands was not uncommon, and indeed, more often than not, the violence meted out by these women was in a physical sense, more ’damaging’ than that inflicted by their male counterparts. The intention of this article therefore, is to examine—through a balanced gendered perspective—the ways in which domestic violence was carried out, the apparent reasons for this behaviour and the consequences of this type of aggressive activity for both offender and victim, regardless of sex. In doing this, it is hoped that the article will shed new light on a traditionally one-sided argument.
- 1 See J. M. Beattie, ‘The Pattern of Crime in England 1660–1800’, Past and Present 62 (1974) 47-95; E (...)
- 2 For further information on these theories see J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1 (...)
- 3 See in particular V. A. C. Gatrell, ‘The Decline of Theft and Violence’ and T. R. Gurr, ‘Historical (...)
2It has long been established by the work of a number of historians such as J. M. Beattie, Ted Royle, Vic Gatrell and T. D. Gurr1, that from the post-1750s period until at least the middle decades of the nineteenth century, there was a significant increase in the incidence of property crime at the expense of violent crimes against the person. Whether this was due to the effects of an ‘Enlightened’ civilising process, increased authoritative controls on aggressive activity or was just part of a longer-term trend of lessening violent behaviour over time, has not yet been clearly established.2 What is more certain according to these historians however, is that the authorities of the day seemed to have become more concerned about threats to status and wealth as a result of theftuous activity increasing, rather than threats to health and well-being. In particular, although overt acts of violence, especially when committed in the process of property crime were not to be tolerated, according to Gatrell and Gurr, what happened behind closed doors was private, on the whole acceptable, and as a result, of little interest to the authorities.3
3The belief in this apparently nonchalant attitude on the part of the ruling elite towards violence in the home has been consistently misjudged and overplayed by historians, as archival evidence reflects that not only was the domestic sphere a focal point for a substantial degree of violence in the early nineteenth century period, but also that this type of violent activity was regularly brought to the court’s attention. Although levels of violent crime may well have been decreasing over time, this reduction was not reflected in the nature and incidence of domestic violence indicted at the various judicial courts of Great Britain.
- 4 B. Malinowski, cited in L. A. Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (New York and London: The Fre (...)
- 5 See S. D’cruze, Crimes of Outrage: Sex, Violence and Victorian Working Women (London: UCL Press, 19 (...)
- 6 See for example Lynn Abrams’ review of Shani D’cruze’s work posted on H-Albion, February 2002: (...)
4As Malinowski would argue, ‘. . . aggression, like charity, begins at home.’4 Recent work done by Shani D’Cruze, Betsy Stanko, Anna Clark and Carol Smart for example substantiates this observation,5 although research of this nature has been heavily criticised for its overwhelming preoccupation with male supremacy and masculine violence in the domestic context.6 The intention of this article then, is to go some way to address the balance in this respect, and look at women’s violence in the home which was regularly directed at husbands, children and domestic servants. By looking at a sample of 230 court cases (95 of them heard at the Old Bailey in London and the remaining 135 brought before the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh between 1835 and 1865) it is hoped that this piece will add a new dimension to traditionally masculinised perceptions of the nature of domestic violence.
- 7 See for instance C. Emsley, Crime and Society in England 1750–1900 (New York and London: Longman, 1 (...)
5Although the piece will focus primarily on the actions of women, due to the proportionately large number of men involved in the cases sampled, it is pertinent to say something initially about the male committal of violence in the domestic sphere during this period. Of the 230 cases of domestic violence sampled, 152 or 66 % were charged against men. This means that women only accounted for a third of the individuals indicted before these Scottish and English courts over the 35 years studied. Men clearly predominated in this category of violent behaviour, as they did in others during the Victorian period.7 Data for male domestic violence based on court evidence must be treated with some caution, however, as at best, it only provides a fractional snapshot of what must have taken place. This was because the common law both north and south of the border, granted husbands the right to ‘correct’ their wives’ behaviour and restrict their movements, and although this right had been seriously challenged and modified by the courts in the eighteenth century, it was still considered by many to exist in the nineteenth century and it was at any event clearly exercised. Women were able to ‘pray the peace’ against their husbands in this period and were thereby able to get some protection from the courts, but it is clear that the ancient right of a husband to chastise his wife was still assumed and there was a great deal of ‘accepted’ wife beating, which was ultimately hidden from the courts’ attention. Consequently, it was only in the most serious of cases, that indictments were brought against husbands.
- 8 C. Smart, Women, Crime and Criminology: A Feminist Critique (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan (...)
- 9 See for instance O. Pollak, The Criminality of Women (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1950).
- 10 See for example M. M. Feeley and D. L. Little, ‘The Vanishing Female: The Decline of Women in the C (...)
6In the same way that men’s perpetration of domestic violence was to a large extent ‘hidden’ due to their accepted dominant position within the household, women’s committal of violent crime within the domestic sphere must also have been ‘masked’, albeit for entirely different reasons. As Carol Smart explains, in general, ‘Violent offences . . . do not appear to be easily reconciled with the traditional conceptualisation of feminine behaviour . . . [V]iolent acts against the person appear to be the complete antithesis of the gentle, retiring caring role of the female sex.’8 Notions of femininity such as that just described were brought to the fore in the Victorian period, and were married to an ideology of domesticity where roles within the home were prescribed according to gender and class-status. Women were expected to remain within the boundaries of femininity and to behave according to its prescribed norms. Consequently, it was believed that if a woman committed an act of violence during the early nineteenth century, she would do so in a manner that did not involve overt aggression, but rather she would act in a way that was relatively appropriate for a member of the so-called ‘gentler sex’. This is why so many criminologists and criminal historians primarily associated women criminals with covert violent practices such as poisoning.9 It is also one of the explanations offered, alongside limited social experience, to account for the reduction in indictments charged against women for homicides and assaults over time, especially those committed out with the home.10 The argument ran that women were withdrawing from the public sphere of society into the private sphere of the home, and their declining incidence in recorded criminal activity over time was a reflection of this trend. Although this hypothesis decriminalised women on the one hand, making their crimes harder to detect than men’s (and therefore more ‘hidden’ in terms of criminal statistics), by implication, it also made women’s actions more sinister, devious and seemingly more dangerous.
- 11 For further information see A. M. Kilday, ’Women and Crime in South-west Scotland: A Study of the J (...)
7In the domestic sphere in particular, there were additional factors which must have resulted in the under-reporting of violent women. The first of these occurred if the victim was a member of the opposite sex and in a position of ‘supposed’ dominance in the household. Certainly, it is reasonable to suggest that a husband assaulted by his wife would incur considerable derision from his friends and the community at large if he was to indict his spouse for the offence. As we have already seen, women were clearly accepted as being subordinate to their male counterparts, especially in terms of the marital relationship. Consequently, any reversal of these ‘roles’ would often result in the victims being subjected to ritualised community satire and this in turn would foster a general unwillingness on the part of the husband to report the offence to the authorities. As a result, it was only in the severest cases of domestic abuse at the hands of women that indictments were brought to court. However, it also should be noted that when serious cases against women did appear in court, due to the fact that they had stepped outside the boundaries of appropriate behaviour for their sex, they were considered abnormal, unfeminine and unnatural, and by consequence, were punished more severely than men charged with similar offences.11
8Another factor involved in the ‘hidden’ nature of women’s perpetration of violence in the home is linked to the wider domestic sphere. The form of ‘licensed violence’ already outlined in relation to the accepted rights of a husband against his wife, was not solely restricted to that relationship alone in early nineteenth century Britain. Parents and employers alike were permitted to commit a degree of ‘domestic bullying’ upon their children and workers, especially domestic servants. Violent actions against these members of the domestic circle were seen as the unquestionable right of those in authority to control the morals and behaviour of those subordinate to them. If we consider that women regularly held the responsibility of managing the household, and that they would have little opportunity elsewhere in the ‘repressed’ domestic sphere to articulate forms of control, it may well often have been the case that women relished their authoritative position with regard to the control of servants and children, and at times, the line between control and abuse must have been a very fine one indeed. Certainly, these types of domestic abuse crimes were most probably also under-reported, as they would too readily invert the long-established master-servant relationship, and this may have been especially true if the victim was male and the attacker female.
9It is clear from the evidence of the sample employed in this article, that women were more often the victims, rather than the aggressors in the domestic arena. Yet, despite problems of under-reporting, enough cases of domestic violence by women came before the courts in the early nineteenth century to facilitate an analysis of this type of criminal behaviour. In terms of intra-marital violence perpetrated by women and brought to court in the early nineteenth century, rather than behaving in a manner appropriate to their sex, on the whole women used blatant, overt aggression in their activities, both fatal and otherwise. Of course we have to bear in mind that these cases only made it to court in the first place due to their serious nature, but nevertheless, nearly two thirds of the 78 Scottish and English cases examined between 1835 and 1865 were committed in this manner, with the most common methods being strangulation, drowning, battery, slashing with razors, stabbing with knives, dashing with pokers and stoning. The weapons used were usually the ones that were close at hand rather than ones that required a degree of premeditation, such as fire-arms or the like. Although poisoning was used from time to time, in general the aggressive nature of intra-marital violence by indicted women in the first half of the nineteenth century cannot be doubted. A few examples will further illustrate this.
- 12 S.R.O. A.D. 14/37/199.
10A case was brought against Isobel McLean at the Scottish High Court in 1837. Isobel was charged with the murder of her husband Henry Small within his own house in Glasgow. The court heard how Isobel attacked and assaulted her husband after he complained about the poor quality of his supper that evening. She gave repeated and violent blows upon Henry’s belly and other parts of his body, and trod and trampled upon him with her feet. She stabbed him on the top of the thigh to the great effusion of his blood with a knife, which she had aimed at the trunk of his body, but which had struck his thigh in consequence of his stooping down to elude the blow. Thereafter, when Henry was laid on his bed in a wounded and languishing condition by reason of the cruel treatment which he had received, Isobel then dragged him out of bed by the hair of the head, threw him down with violence on to the floor whilst biting and tearing at him with her teeth, and she then proceeded to beat him about the head with a poker. In consequence of the wounds and bruises inflicted, Henry Small died a few hours after the attack.12
11Another example, is yet more bloodthirsty. Agnes Keir was accused at the Scottish High Court in 1844 of having a groundless malice and ill will against her husband Alexander Colquhoun, who was a merchant in Wigtown. She was said to have expressed a strong desire for his death to occur and regularly begged others in the neighbourhood to kill him for her. On the 28th of September 1844, after spending the night with three men in a local tavern, she came home, immediately locked the door behind her and began to abuse her husband. She seized a chopping knife and gave Alexander a stroke on the lower torso which sliced off a portion of his private member. She also gave him a stroke in the leg with the knife, which he received about four inches below the knee, and which made a large wound in his leg, penetrating into the bone, fracturing and shattering it and causing a great effusion of blood. The effects of the wound and violent contusion resulted in Alexander being confined to his bed in the greatest pain and agony.13
- 14 P.R.O. CRIM/1/3/15.
- 15 P.R.O. CRIM/1/1/16.
- 16 S.R.O. A.D. 14/31/75.
- 17 S.R.O. A.D. 14/25/68.
12Further examples could include Ann Horton, who attacked her husband with a bill-hook in Stanmore Parish in 1842;14 Sarah Allen who slit her husband’s throat with a razor in Chelsea Parish in 1840,15 George Watson from Dumfries who told the court in 1841 how his wife had stabbed him in the back with his own razor16, or another man from Glasgow who was beaten so severely by his wife that a magistrate committed him to prison for his own protection.17
- 18 L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977) 93.
- 19 For further information see C. Smart, Women, Crime and Criminology 17.
13Motives for intra-marital violence were diverse in origin. They could stem from the mere refusal to do a prescribed task, accusations of impropriety in terms of either relationships or criminal activity, jealousy, self-defence or even the accidental breakage of crockery: ‘. . . trivial disagreements rapidly led to blows.’18 Typically, however, all of these motives were very much related to the environment in which the eventual act of aggression was to occur. Often of course, domestic violence, and in particular, domestic homicides, were victim precipitated, that is the eventual victim was the original instigator of violence.19 It must often have been the case that women on the receiving end of years of physical and mental abuse (with divorce not a real option in economic terms or otherwise), built up tensions, jealousies and hatred over that time which would eventually result in a sudden outburst of spontaneous violence. This could take the form of a ‘hot-blooded’ act of homicide or assault, or a simple act of self-defence. The evidence of the instruments used in the committal of these offences by the indicted British women used in this study seem to lend weight to this argument. With a few exceptions, most of the assaults were carried out using implements near at hand when tempers frayed such as household objects like razors, knives and pokers.
14Evidence of the abusive treatment of children by women in the domestic sphere in the Victorian period is hard to come by. In Scots Law, children were considered part of a family’s moveable estate, just like a wardrobe or a piece of jewellery, and it appears similar contemptible attitudes were held about children south of the border too. The disciplining of children by their parents was considered a wholly private and legitimate affair, and of course the children would not and could not bring prosecutions against their parents, on account of their age and due to the belittled regard in which they were held by authorities and society alike. Consequently, it was exceedingly rare for prosecutions of this nature to be brought to court, and when this did occur, it was only the most severe cases of cruelty and brutality that were indicted. Having said this, however, it should be noted that from around the late 1830s period onwards, Scottish and English courts increasingly adopted new types of legislation which at the very least reflected a heightened awareness of this type of domestic abuse. Individuals from that period could be specifically indicted for ’Gross Cruelty of Children’, and the three cases uncovered in the sample survey related to women’s assault of children in the domestic sphere, fell under this charge.
- 20 S.R.O. A.D. 14/39/305.
- 21 P.R.O. CRIM/6/8/Book 8.
- 22 P.R.O. CRIM/6/9/Book 9.
15Agnes Douglas was charged in Edinburgh in 1839 with ’Gross Cruelty’ against her eight year old daughter Joanna whom she had stabbed in the legs repeatedly with a pitchfork. The surgeon who examined the child found numerous previous marks of violence about the girl’s body. When asked why she behaved in this manner, Agnes explained that she did these things to her child on account of the shame of her own fornication and the embarrassment of the child’s illegitimacy which had resulted in the Elders of the Kirk Session putting her in a House of Correction for one week every month since the child’s birth.20 Sarah Marlborough on the other hand, was indicted along with her husband James at the Old Bailey in 1853 charged with the same crime. The court heard how their two children were kept in the cellar of their house along with a pig, and that the children were found with their eyes beaten, bruised from head to foot, half starved and in a miserable condition.21 Also in 1857, the case against Mary Hicks for ’Gross Cruelty’ against her two step-children was heard at the Old Bailey. The children recounted in a statement that their step-mother was in the frequent habit of plunging them into a tub of cold-water, and that she used to beat them with sticks, rods and a toasting fork, and that the two black eyes which one of the children had, were as a result of a fierce beating she had given with a wooden spoon.22
16Clearly these cases go some way to demonstrate how badly children could be treated in the Victorian period, but these types of crimes must have been greatly hidden from court evidence and from the public view. Motives for this type of behaviour seem to be multifarious and linked to individual situations and circumstances. Certainly, parents believed in their long-established right to discipline their children, so perhaps motives are less of an issue in this context than in the cases of intra-marital violence already examined.
17In a similar way, the abuse of servants by women was also tacitly accepted or seen as justifiable in the Victorian period. Servants were often regarded with contempt and regularly maltreated as a result. The closeness and immediacy of family life made for a high degree of supervision over those who lived as servants and apprentices, and often it was the role of the mistress of the household to maintain this supervision and keep servants’ behaviour in line. As with the other instances of domestic abuse, this category of the offence was most likely under-reported due to the diminished social standing of servants, who would have found it difficult to bring a charge of cruelty against their employers. 28 cases in the sample survey, almost a third of the indictments against women investigated were of this nature. Again specific motives were hard to determine, but as was the case with the abuse of children, the violence implemented seems to have been more systematic and routine than that perpetrated against husbands or paramours. Again a few examples illustrate the nature and degree of aggression that took place in this context.
- 23 S.R.O. A.D. 14/41/84.
- 24 P.R.O. CRIM/6/7/Book 7.
- 25 P.R.O. CRIM/6/5/Book 5.
- 26 P.R.O. CRIM/6/7/Book 7.
18Margaret McFarlane was indicted for the aggravated assault of her servant Elizabeth Algie at the High Court in Edinburgh in 1841. Margaret McFarlane claimed that she gave Elizabeth Algie certain articles of clothing which she wanted her to wash, and which the servant latterly either lost or stole. Mrs McFarlane then interrogated Elizabeth as to the whereabouts of her belongings but she made no reply, and so Mrs McFarlane chided her for being careless, ‘. . . as she thought she had right and authority to do, Elizabeth being her servant.’ Elizabeth Algie’s version of the so called ‘chiding’ was that Mrs McFarlane punched her in the face with her fists, bit off her nose to the great effusion of her blood, tore her clothes from her body and shut and bolted the door of the family house upon her in the dead of night with intention to have murdered her.23 Alice Robinson was indicted at the Old Bailey in 1850 charged with regularly assaulting her servant Susannah Wilson with heated tongs,24 Elizabeth Middleton was accused at the Old Bailey in 1844 of regularly whipping her servants (both male and female) for hours on end with rods soaked in brine25 and Katherine Hand was indicted in 1849 at the Old Bailey for attacking and wounding her maid servant Elizabeth Wood with an axe, after discovering that the said Elizabeth Wood had been made pregnant by the master of the house, the accused’s husband.26
19Clearly there is much more to learn about the involvement of women in domestic abuse, especially in terms of women as the perpetrators of violence. What has been presented in this article, merely scratches the surface of this category of female criminality, and a lot more work needs to be carried out before more definitive analysis can be carried out. Traditionally, women in the Victorian period as far as criminologists and criminal historians are concerned, have conformed to the stereotypical image of the ’angel in the house’, only rarely committing violent crime, and when doing so, committing it in a non-violent or unthreatening way. Certainly, less women were indicted for these types of offences, but whether women were excused from crime on account of their sex in this period needs closer investigation. Were violent women ignored on the whole by the authorities as they were deemed unnatural, or were they more likely to be prosecuted, for that very reason? Although today’s society has modernised and moved closer towards gender equality in various social spheres, the study of crime seems to be still in the ’Dark Ages’ in this respect. Perhaps after a more thorough examination of women’s perpetration of domestic violence has been carried out, the concept of the ’angel in the house’ might be redrawn to envisage something more akin to the ’virago in the house’. We’ll have to wait and see.
Flux RSS
