Citation

Bloch RH. Early Am. Stud. Interdiscipl. J. 2007; 5(2): 223-251.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, University of Pennsylvania Press)

DOI

10.1353/eam.2007.0008

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Using Abigail Adams's famous plea "to remember the Ladies" as its starting point, this paper examines the legal treatment of wife beating between the colonial period and the mid-nineteenth century. Trends within judicial decisions, legal treatises, and justice of the peace manuals suggest that the American Revolution contributed to a decline in the state's willingness to intervene on behalf of victims of domestic violence. Pointing to the American Revolution's dual commitment to private rights and to private life, the paper situates these trends within the longer evolution of American understandings of privacy rights. A central piece of the argument is that postrevolutionary understandings of "a right to privacy" (though that term itself was never used) were applied not to individuals but to social institutions such as the family, and that abused wives, as subordinate individuals within the family, lost opportunities to seek legal redress that had existed previously. The paper challenges common assumptions that wife beating had long been condoned by the English common law. It traces this assumption back to judicial decisions in the early United States, most notably the 1824 case of Bradley v. State, in which the value of familial privacy was joined to the unfounded premise that husbands possessed an age-old right to physically chastise their disobedient wives.