Wife-beating

“ There is no splendid audacity about their transgressions. They gouge a mate with a dull knife, or beat his head in with an iron pot, and then sit down and wait for the police. Wife-beating is the masculine prerogative of matrimony. ”

“ Only a few days ago a man was dismissed by the courts because he swore on oath that he thought the girl he had wronged was more than sixteen years of age. Wife-beating is a crime which generally meets with very lenient treatment in this country when compared with an offence against property. ”

“ This wife-beating among a certain class is so common that I have found plenty of wives who take it as a perfect matter of course, and some do not mind very much unless they are seriously damaged. But there are others with whom it is far different; and this leads me to speak of another class among whom I have found agony and anxiety, suffering and hopelessness, that cannot be imagined.
Their homes are clean, nay, often refined, and comfortable; the women do not go out to work, and, unless absolutely in fear of their lives, they do not charge their husbands. ”

“ In fact they seem to have less affection for a man, unless he occasionally establishes his superiority by whipping them. The men actually believe that a woman loves her husband all the better for an occasional beating; and certainly the facts would seem to warrant their theory. I have known cases in which the whole force was aroused at night by the noise in some cabin, where a man was beating his wife—she resisting, screaming, threatening, and finally seizing a knife and rushing after him. Next morning I have seen such couples as loving and bright as though their honeymoon was just beginning. ”

“ When any husband is known to treat his wife extremely ill by beating her, and when the offence is long and unreasonably continued, while the wife's character is unexceptionable, the indignation of the neighbourhood, becoming gradually vehement, at last breaks out into action in the following manner:—All the women enter into conspiracy to execute vengeance upon the culprit. ”

“ How incomprehensible is woman's love!—it is not kindness that wins it, nor return that insures it; we daily see the most devoted attachment lavished on those who seem to us singularly unworthy. The Spectator shewed his usual knowledge of human nature, when, in speaking on this subject, he relates, that in a town besieged by the enemy, on the women being allowed to depart with whatever they held most precious, only one among them carried off her husband,—a man notorious for his tyrannical temper, and who had, moreover, a bad—or, as it turned out, a good—habit of beating his wife every morning. ”

“ They disarm the husband, and force him to pardon and to kiss his wife, and soon he pretends to love her better than ever. He walks along, his arm linked in hers, singing and dancing until, in a new access of drunkenness, he rolls upon the ground, and then begin all over again the lamentations of the wife, her discouragements, her pretended unfaithfulness, her husband's jealousy, the interference of the neighbors, and the reconciliation. ”

“ How did you come to this immense forest, abandoning all affection for your relatives and family? Such obstreperous, violent conduct is unbecoming in women. It is said, that a wife should perform her duties with strict obedience to her husband, whoever he may be; whether she marry one who is a coward, wicked, foolish, deceitful, ugly, a leper, one-eyed, blind, decrepit, lame or poor. ”

“ Forgiveness is no word for such lips as yours, Lady Kingsland! Keep your guilty secret, or your father's or your mother's, whosoever it may be; but not as my wife! No, madame! when the world begins to point the finger of scorn, through her own evil-doing, at the woman I have married, then from that hour she is no longer my wife. The law of divorce shall free you and your secrets together; but until that freedom comes, I command you to meet this man no more! On your peril you write to him, or speak to him, or meet him again. If you do, by the living Lord, I will murder you both! ”

“ A married woman who declines the polite services of all gentlemen, except her husband and near relatives, is a prude, with false scruples of propriety and delicacy. Let her legal partner complain—he is cried out upon as a despot, and you can trust the sweet angel of an abused wife to elude his vigilance—violence, she terms it—for the future, without altering her conduct in aught else. ”

“ Mere austerity of temper, petulance of manners, rudeness of language, a want of civil attention, even occasional sallies of passion, do not amount to that cruelty which the law can relieve. The wife must disarm her husband by the weapons of kindness! ”

“ On the other hand, neglect of the wife by the husband is made a ground for judicial separation with the usual consequences—alimony, etc. “Thus,” as it has been put, “between the upper and the nether millstone, cruelty on the one hand, neglect on the other, the unhappy husband can be legally ground to pieces, whether he does anything or whether he does nothing.” Personal violence on the part of the husband is severely punished; on the part of a wife she will be let off with impunity. ”

“ It is shocking to think, that a wife should be so depraved as to aid in removing the obstacles, which impede her husband in his licentious pursuits; and that a woman should forget her sex so far, as to aim at the destruction of female innocence! ”

“ Whether that is a motive for murder depends entirely on the temper and temperament of the married ones themselves. But—it is very rarely that a wife kills her husband.”
“Why, there are lots of cases in the papers,” said Miss Ames. “And never are the women convicted, either!” ”

“ The girl shrank. "Don't!" she cried, "don't add to cruelty and cowardice—treachery to her! She is very cruel, but then a good wife who suspects a wrong to her love has a right to be cruel!"
"Oh, you innocent, just soul!" the man cried. "Yes, she is cruel in very deed, since being a wife in name alone these years past she yet clings tenaciously to that empty title. She has not enough womanly pride to free the man who earnestly pleads to be released, whose chill indifference protects her from temptation. ”

“ Tens of thousands of wives and mothers are to be seen, all over the country, at once the perpetrators and victims of this cruel and disgusting act; all, all to administer to the sensualism of men, who are called husbands! Husbands! the guilt is mainly yours; and the damnation is just. Beneath your foul wrong to their nature, your wives sink, and you must go down with them.
Ponder the following extract from a private letter, containing the experience of a wife and mother, in regard to enforced and hated maternity and ante-natal child-murder. ”

“ The ladies may have been more than commonly depraved. But it may be observed that our general experience is not in favour of a wife’s permitting her husband to be guilty of lascivious conduct towards another woman in her presence, or of a married daughter’s conniving at her husband’s irregularities with her own mother. ”

“ Though this event may often fall out, that the brutality of a husband produces the infidelity of a wife, yet it need not be shewn upon the stage; women are not generally so tame in their natures, as to bear neglect with patience, and the natural resentments of the human heart will without any other monitor point out the method of revenge. ”

“ What would become of the good order of society or the decency of families, if every politic wife were to receive or invite, or permit her husband's mistress to reside in her house? What would become of conjugal virtue in either sex, if the wife were in this manner not only to connive at the infidelity of her husband, but to encourage and provide for his inconsistency? If she enters into bonds of amity and articles of partnership with her rival, with that person by whom she has been most injured, instead of being the dignified sufferer, she becomes an object of contempt. ”

“ Always with that sense of injury full upon him, that half-concealed but ever-present desire for revenge upon the wife who has so coldly condemned and cast him aside, he flings himself willingly into a flirtation, ready made to his hand, and as dangerous as it seems light. ”

“ A man, then, has been known to call his wife “jealous, disaffectionate, reproachful, and censorious.” And again, a wife’s faults and shortcomings have been published to the world, and children must be mortified to know that in the public documents of the country allusion is conspicuously made to the failings of their mother, as when a husband perpetuates his wife’s “unprovoked, unjustifiable fits of passion, violence, and cruelty.” ”

“ The hourly clash of angry tempers and selfish desires, brutality and neglect on the part of the husband, met by reproaches from the wife, and yet with all this, and perhaps the vice of intoxication in addition, the wretched pair must drag out a miserable existence till “death do them part.” Happy those countries where divorce is permitted for other, though not slighter causes than infidelity! ”

“ Hence the brutality of vulgar husbands, who, after having in every possible and intolerable manner forfeited their wife's love, believe themselves justified in killing her when her precious lord has become revolting to her and another one pleases her better. Such cases are especially adapted to enlighten us as to the nature and the consequences of common jealousy. ”

“ The offence for which the woman has suffered is perfectly well known by all the spectators, and by none better than by the sufferer herself. The fact is, she has been bad-tempered at home, quarrelling, in all probability, with her fellow wives, and has not yielded to the admonitions of her husband. Consequently, at the next favorable opportunity, either the husband himself, or a man whom he has instructed, indues the dress of Mumbo Jumbo, and indicts a punishment which serves equally as a corrective to the disobedient wife and a warning to others that they had better not follow her example. ”

“ He has to advance her money to enable her to fight him. Should the case come on for hearing the husband finds the scale still more weighted against him; every slander of his wife is assumed to be true until he has proved its falsity, the slightest act or a word during a moment of irritation, even a long time back, being twisted into what is termed “legal cruelty,” even though such has been provoked by a long course of ill treatment and neglect on the part of the wife. ”

“ Even the gentry and nobility of Great Britain are not all exempt from brutal manifestations of power toward their wives. We once sheltered in our own house for weeks the wife of an English Earl who had been forced to leave her home and family through the brutality of her high-born husband—brutality from which the law could not or would not protect her. She died at our house, and when she was robed for her last rest much care had to be taken to arrange the dress and hair so that the scars of wounds inflicted on the throat, neck and cheek by her cruel husband might not be too apparent. ”

“ When the wife’s misfortunes have been explained, the young men of the company try to persuade her to leave her drunken husband and to amuse herself with them. They offer her their arms and drag her away. Little by little she gives way; her spirits rise, and she begins to run about, first with one and then with another, and grows more scandalous in her behavior: a fresh “morality”; the ill-conduct of the husband excites and aggravates the evil in the wife. ”

“ Just as the husband shows his anger and mistrust in his face, so his wife betrays, to those who look carefully at her, her innocence and simplicity, by the trouble in her face and eyes, and the wrong which is done to her in making her swear and in proclaiming her publicly as an adulteress. ”

“ When the man who had wrecked her life came and knelt beside her, prayed her to be patient and her wrongs should be righted, spoke of his remorse, told her of his terrible mad wife from whom the law would set him free, and make him really hers, prayed, besought, and worshipped at her feet, she answered him with one terrible word only. ”

“ The brutality of a husband toward his wife, when he is in love with another, often knows no limits. From bad temper, chicanery, contempt and hatred, he often goes on to blows and even murder, as the annals of criminology prove too well. Egoistic women who have a lover, also treat their husbands badly. Owing to their legal subordination and comparative physical weakness, they reveal their sentiments in a less brutal form, but malice and bad temper are not wanting. ”

“ On the other hand, the Injury done, is very considerable, as such an Action tends to corrupt a Woman’s Mind, and destroy that mutual Love and Affection between Man and Wife, which is so necessary to both their Happiness. ”

“ A man may punish his wife for any misdemeanour or neglect of duty; and many of them bear upon their backs ugly scars and wounds inflicted by the sword of an enraged husband. However abused, it is vain for her to appeal to the town; for it is the town of the husband’s family, and she is the stranger. And, besides, the saying among them is that you must never tell a woman that she is right, lest she despise her husband.
A source of injustice, in the case of polygamy, is the influence of the head-wife ”