Early Modern Perspectives on the Long History of Domestic Violence: The Case of Seventeenth Century France
Author(s)
Howells, Kevin
Abstract
Few signifiers of the persistence of gender inequality are more potent than the evidence across many centuries of men beating their domestic partners. Yet the historicization of family conflict demands that we interrogate the specific and widely varied dynamics that shaped attitudes toward and experiences of spousal violence. Although a seventeenth century woman was legally subject to her husband’s discipline, wives themselves as well as individuals and institutions in local communities publicly negotiated the parameters of that discipline. A twentieth century woman living in a community that valorized romantic, companionate, and privatized ideals of marriage was, by contrast, isolated and wary of public acknowledgment of her status as a battered wife.
This essay explores the matrix of early modern urban conjugal battery in seventeenth century France to examine how and why individuals and communities defined the use of force between spouses as they did. Despite clichés about the early modern period’s acceptance of wife beating, attitudes toward domestic violence were complex. Certainly, men’s aggression toward their wives was naturalized to a degree, and women’s violence against their husbands was demonized. But, in practice, women as well as men, in courts and in communities, negotiated parameters for spousal behavior that defined husbands’ prerogatives in using force. What issues defined some men’s behavior as abusive rather than “corrective”? What catalysts triggered wife beating? What resources were available to battered wives? How did the experiences of working families differ from those of elite families? These issues are crucial both to examining particular manifestations of spousal battery and to identifying markers that delineated the long history of domestic violence.
