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Domestic Violence, Past and Present Sarah B. Pomeroy. The Murder of Regilla: A Case of Domestic Violence in Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. xii +249. ISBN 978-0674-02583-7.
Sara M. Butler. The Language of Abuse: Marital Violence in Later Medieval England. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2007. xii + 287. ISBN 978-90-04-15634-0.
Frances E. Dolan. Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 235 pp. ISBN 978-0- 81122-4075-7.
Kristin Bumiller. In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. xvi+216. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4239-7.
Before the 1970s, judges and police officers still saw wife beating as a trivial offense-policemen would tell husbands to calm down and wives to stop annoying them, and cases rarely came to court. Popular culture depicted wife beating as a joke, and psychiatrists saw it as a pathology of the underclass or of individual women. In general, the problem was denied or explained away.
In the 1970s, feminists documented the widespread incidence of wife beating and asserted that it was not just working-class husbands who assaulted their wives, but all classes of men. They defined wife beating as one extreme in a spectrum of male efforts to dominate women, and argued that rape was a crime of violence, not sex. Feminists founded shelters where women could take refuge, demanded that the police do more to protect women, and advocated for battered women in the courts.
The related analyses of male domination and female victimization have become more complex. Feminists started calling battered women "survivors" to emphasize that they were not just passive victims. However, social scientists also started to study domestic violence, and some researchers came up with the idea that women committed domestic assaults in the same numbers as men (although the severity of the assaults was not measured). Psychologists argued that battered women needed therapeutic treatment. At the same time, the diagnosis of "battered woman syndrome" could also be used to defend women who had killed violent husbands. Today, wife beating is once again seen as a pathology or a tragedy. The feminist critique has been taken up by mainstream culture but also muted.
In the past, domestic violence was often seen as a way husbands could legitimately...