"The Public Gaze and the Prying Eye": Privacy, Slavery and Wife Abuse in 19th-Century Courts
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Description
“It is difficult to define with precision what is and what is not extreme and repeated cruelty,” an Illinois judge noted in 1882. Throughout the century, some courts acted in accordance with the words of an anonymous author of an 1831 piece in the Carolina Law Journal: “The indurance of partial suffering, from incompatibility of tempers, or vicious habits, among married people is an evil vastly less... than that which arises” from easy divorce. Judicially, for some courts the tone had been set by an often cited late eighteenth-century English case, Evans v. Evans. In a long drawn out judgment, Sir William Scott had declared: “the happiness of some individuals must be sacrificed to the greater and more general good.” In New York in 1863 Hannah Solomon accused her husband of attempting to break her arm, of pulling a chair out from under her while she was holding her child, and of kicking her several times. The judge was not convinced she was telling the truth, but in the end he decided it really did not matter. If true, this “single instance” of cruelty “should receive the reprobation of every just person,” but still, it ought to be forgiven. Husbands and wives “should bear long and patiently with each other.” As Iowa Chief Justice Day put it in 1871, “married couples, for the good of their common offspring, the conservation of social order, and the maintenance of general morality, must bear with patience and composure the occasional disquietudes growing out of inharmonious tempers and dispositions.” Ruling in an 1890 case which involved at least one act of violence, “outbursts of temper,” an undescribed incident with a poker,“It is difficult to define with precision what is and what is not extreme and repeated cruelty,” an Illinois judge noted in 1882, although for some judges it hardly mattered. Throughout the century, some courts, fortunately only a minority, acted in accordance with the words of an anonymous author of an 1831 piece in the Carolina Law Journal: “The indurance of partial suffering, from incompatibility of tempers, or vicious habits, among married people is an evil vastly less... than that which arises” from easy divorce. Judicially, for some courts the tone had been set by an often cited late eighteenth-century English case, Evans v. Evans. In a long drawn out judgment, Sir William Scott had declared: “the happiness of some individuals must be sacrificed to the greater and more general good.” In New York in 1863 Hannah Solomon accused her husband of attempting to break her arm, of pulling a chair out from under her while she was holding her child, and of kicking her several times. The judge was not convinced she was telling the truth, but in the end he decided it really did not matter. If true, this “single instance” of cruelty “should receive the reprobation of every just person,” but still, it ought to be forgiven. Husbands and wives “should bear long and patiently with each other.” As Iowa Chief Justice Day put it in 1871, “married couples, for the good of their common offspring, the conservation of social order, and the maintenance of general morality, must bear with patience and composure the occasional disquietudes growing out of inharmonious tempers and dispositions.” Ruling in an 1890 case which involved at least one act of violence, “outbursts of temper,” an undescribed incident with a poker, the display of a pistol, and a broken promise not to drink, a New York Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s grant of separation. It might well be disagreeable for a woman to continue an association with such a man, but “the necessity to endure... is one of the evils attending the marriage state.”1 Or, as Sir William Scott had put it one hundred years earlier, marriage was “for better, for worse,” to be “submitted to with patience” even when it “exhibit[s] a great deal of the misery that clouds human life.”
ISBN
9781792190841
Publication Date
3-11-2019
Publisher
Independently published
City
Place of publication not indicated
Keywords
Wife abuse, Family violence
Disciplines
History of Gender | Social History | United States History
Recommended Citation
Nadelhaft, Jerome J., ""The Public Gaze and the Prying Eye": Privacy, Slavery and Wife Abuse in 19th-Century Courts" (2019). Faculty and Staff Monograph Publications. 310.
https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/fac_monographs/310
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