Early modern perspectives on the long history of domestic violence: The case of seventeenth-century France

Journal of Modern History

Volumn 78, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 1-36

  Hardwick, Julie ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

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EID: 33645135134     PISSN: 00222801     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/499793     Document Type: Review

References (168)

1. Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700 (Ithaca, NY, 1994);
2. Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville, VA, 1992).
3. Two useful syntheses of this now vast literature that include valuable bibliographies are Merry Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2000),
4. and Olwyn Hufton, The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1500-1800 (New York, 1996).
5. For brief synthetic overviews, see Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (Cambridge, 1988), esp. 323-44 (dominated by Anglo-America);
6. and Julius Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2001), 131-40. On the church court versus secular jurisdiction issue, the success of women in Cambrai, the only French region where ecclesiastical courts retained jurisdiction over separations, and in Venice seems to contrast starkly with the very low rates of success in secular court in Rouen. (I note that this low success rate in French secular courts is misleading because women in France used separate property requests as well as suits for separation of person and property as remedies for domestic violence, as this essay explains below.) However, a German study suggests that, in reformed Protestant cities in the sixteenth century, municipal courts built on medieval guild tradition to discipline abusive husbands, while a Parisian study suggests that the emergence of local police in the eighteenth century provided embattled wives with a valuable new recourse.
7. See Alain Lottin, "Vie et mort du couple: Difficultés conjugales et divorces dans le nord de la France aux XVII et XVIIIe siècles," XVIIe Siècle Revue 102-3 (1974): 59-78;
8. Roderick Phillips, Family Breakdown in Late Eighteenth-Century France: Divorces in Rouen, 1792-1803 (Oxford, 1980), 108-24, 185;
9. Joanne M. Ferraro, "The Power to Decide: Battered Wives in Early Modern Venice," Renaissance Quarterly 48, no. 3 (1995): 492-512;
10. Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (London, 1989), 185-94;
11. Alan Williams, "Patterns of Conflict in Eighteenth-Century Parisian Families," Journal of Family History 18, no. 1 (1993): 39-52.
12. Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 131-40;
13. and Phillips, Family Breakdown, 185.
14. See Susan Amussen, "Punishment, Discipline, and Power: The Social Meanings of Violence in Early Modern England," Journal of British Studies 34, no. 1 (1995): 1-34,
15. and '"Being Stirred to Much Unquietness': Violence and Domestic Violence in Early Modern England," Journal of Women's History 6, no. 2 (1994): 70-89;
16. Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996), 206-29;
17. Margaret Hunt, "Wife Beating, Domesticity, and Women's Independence in Eighteenth-Century London," Gender and History 4, no. 1 (1992): 10-33;
18. Leah Leneman, '"A Tyrant and Tormentor': Violence against Wives in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland," Continuity and Change 12, no. 1 (1997): 31-54.
19. Much more work has been done for the modern period, primarily for Britain, in terms of the genesis of conflicts and the evolution of responses and resources. See esp. Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, 1995), esp. 63-87, 259-63;
20. Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston, 1880-1960 (New York, 1988);
21. Ellen Ross, "'Fierce Questions and Taunts': Married Life in Working-Class London, 1870-1914," Feminist Studies 8 (1982): 575-602,
22. and Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1919 (Oxford, 1993), 84-87;
23. Nancy Tomes, "A Torrent of Abuse': Crimes of Violence between Working-Class Men and Women in London, 1840-1875," Journal of Social History 11 (1978): 328-45.
24. read Martin J. Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge, 2004), a stimulating analysis of male homicide (including husbands who killed their wives), after I completed this article.
25. Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Over the Threshold: Intimate Violence in Early America (New York, 1999), includes examinations of a variety of forms of family violence, mostly after 1750.
26. For an overview of the literature on many forms of violence, see Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe. Ruff explains declines in violence primarily through the concept of a "civilizing society"- an idea pioneered by Norbert Elias - in which early modern people increasingly came to reject violence.
27. Important interpretations of neighborhood management of violence include James R. Farr, Hands of Honor: Artisans and Their World in Dijon, 1550-1650 (Ithaca, NY, 1986), esp. 150-95;
28. and David Garrioch, Neighborhood and Community in Paris, 1740-1790 (Cambridge, 1986), esp. 31-55.
29. For perspectives on the emergence of the concept of privacy, see the History of Private Life series, esp. the fourth volume: Roger Chartier, ed., History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA, 1989).
30. On the lack of consensus, see, e.g., the opposing conclusions of Ruff (Violence in Early Modern Europe),
31. who argues that domestic violence declined from the mid-eighteenth century as violence became more unacceptable and victims and neighbors more willing to complain, and historians like Clark (Struggle for the Breeches)
32. or Ross (" 'Fierce Questions and Taunts' "), who argue for increases in domestic violence accompanied by rising reluctance of neighbors or family to intervene.
33. French jurisdictional geography was complex. Court of first instance jurisdiction over separations (as other affairs) varied from place to place, depending mainly on local histories of jurisdictional conflicts. With the exception of the diocese of Cambrai, secular courts had gained jurisdiction over these kinds of disputes by the seventeenth century. In Lyon a sénéchausée heard the cases, while in Nantes a provost's court did so, although the city also had a sénéchausée. In Macon, both the provost's court and the sénéchausée heard separation cases. I discuss these issues and their impact at length in the larger project from which this essay draws, "Courting Families." The cases in which domestic violence was mentioned involved 223 couples (some in court on more than one occasion), with 144 from Nantes and seventy-nine from Lyon. Sixty-five requests were for separations of property, 126 were for separations of person and property, nine asked the court to determine the appropriate remedy, and the type of separation is unknown in twenty-three cases. I have not been able to find any criminal prosecutions for spousal violence short of murder under any category in sampling criminal records in either Nantes or Lyon, nor any separation cases in seigneurial courts that operated in rural areas around the cities. For figures on criminal prosecutions of familial homicides, see Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 138.
34. For a broader discussion of the issues involved in separation cases of both kinds, see Julie Hardwick, "Seeking Separations: Gender, Marriages, and Household Economies in Seventeenth-Century France," French Historical Studies 21, no. 1 (1998): 157-80. Almost no other work exists on separate property cases, although they were far more common than cases involving separations of person and property.
35. For the latter, see also Lottin, "Vie et mort du couple";
36. Sarah Hanley, "Social Sites of Political Prac tice in France: Lawsuits, Civil Rights, and the Separation of Powers in Domestic and State Government, 1500-1800," American Historical Review 102, no. 1 (1997): 27-52.
37. Occasional references breach the usual silence about the many other permutations of family violence, which are very elusive, although also critical to the development of a comprehensive long history of domestic violence: a wife, who slapped, kicked, and scratched her husband, locked him out and poured a urine-filled chamber pot over him (Archives Départementales de Loire-Atlantique [hereafter ADLA] B5843, July 19, 1691, and July 31, 1691); a surgeon's dry summary of the bruises, open wounds, and mangled limbs of a toddler (Archives Départementales du Rhone [hereafter ADR] BP4506, May 27, 1633); a man who beat his mother-in-law (ADLA B5819, December 15, 1663); a brawl between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law (ADLA B5839, December 6 and 11, 1687); the exchange of blows between stepmother and stepchildren (ADLA B5833, November 23, 1680); allegations of paternal abuse of children (ADR BP3984, March 30,1674; ADR BP1643, April 30, 1700; ADR BP1643, July 29, 1705); an allegation of filial abuse of father (ADR BP2845, March 17, 1661). While women were far more likely to be battered by their spouses than men were, wives could also take the lead: almost half of family complaints to the police in eighteenth-century Paris were by wives against husbands, but a fifth were by husbands against wives (with other family conflicts making up the remainder). Williams, "Patterns of Conflict," 45.
38. For discussions that have highlighted women's role as agents as well as victims in various kinds of household violence, see Kristen B. Neuschel, "Noblewomen and War in Sixteenth-Century France," in Changing Identities in Early Modern France, ed. Michael Wolfe (Durham, NC, 1996), 124-44;
39. and Frances Dolan, "Household Chastisements: Gender, Authority, and 'Domestic Violence,' " in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia, 1999), 204-25.
40. ADR BP4045, folder 1720, April 9, 1720.
41. The urban poor and peasants from the urban hinterlands rarely used these courts as litigants, although they did speak as witnesses. Nor did peasants use the rural seigneurial courts in their own communities for these kinds of cases. Such families, whether urban or rural, probably lacked the financial wherewithal to go to court and may have resolved their differences by other means, such as simply abandoning their spouses.
42. I do not of course mean that no hierarchies or tensions also shaped close-knit neighborhood relations, but common ground was important, too. I explore the demographics of witnesses and a broad-based street model of appropriate family relations in Julie Hardwick, "Between State and Street: Witnesses and the Family Politics of Litigation in Early Modern France," in Family, State and Law in Early Modern France, ed. Suzanne Desan and Jeffrey Merrick (forthcoming).
43. For a rich discussion of how sixteenth-century petitioners, including some women, presented themselves in seeking pardons from death penalty sentences for homicides, see Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Palo Alto, CA, 1987).
44. For narrative tropes in litigation more broadly, see Gowing, Domestic Dangers, esp. 232-62.
45. An extensive print debate about husbands' discretionary use of violence of the kind that took place in England apparently did not occur in France. Nevertheless, most French authors of literary texts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did condemn wife beating: Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, NY, 1990), 191. For the print debate in early modern England,
46. see Amussen, "'Being Stirred to Much Unquietness'";
47. and Hunt, "Wife Beating."
48. ADR BP5985, folder 1653, January 30, 1653.
49. For a valuable discussion of various forms of early modern violence, see Amussen, "Punishment, Discipline, and Power."
50. For a brief overview of the legal history of men's entitlement to use force against their wives, see Phillips, Putting Asunder, 323-32.
51. Charivaris, e.g., were ritual expressions of community disapproval of wife-beating husbands who were seen to have gone too far. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Palo Alto, CA, 1975).
52. ADR BP3985, folder 1654, February 10, 1654.
53. For the persistence of very similar rhetoric in late eighteenth-century separation suits, see Jeffrey Merrick, "Domestic Politics: Divorce and Despotism in Late Eighteenth-Century France," in The Past as Prologue: Essays to Celebrate the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of ASECS, ed. Carla H. Hay and Sydney Congers (London, 1995), 373-86.
54. Other husbands simply denied their wives' complaints completely or responded defensively to the legal standard by asserting that their behavior had not imperiled the lives of their wives.
55. ADR BP3985, folder 1656, August 17, 1656; ADR BP4045, folder 1720, August 31, 1720; ADR BP4045, folder 1691, June 18, 1691.
56. See, e.g., Phillips, Family Breakdown, 120.
57. ADR BP3985, folder 1649, February 5, 1649.
58. ADR BP3985, folder 1641, December 21, 1641; ADR BP4045, January 19, 1690.
59. ADR BP4045, folder 1690, June 30, 1690; ADR BP4045, folder 1691, October 2, 1691.
60. ADLA B5843, August 8, 1691.
61. ADR BP4045, folder "crim sep corps," November 3, 1700; ADLA B5815 1647 (no month or day given).
62. ADR BP4045, folder 1691, April 11, 1691.
63. ADLA B5815, September 16, 1647; ADLA B5813, May 13, 1645.
64. ADLA B5830, October 17, 1677.
65. ADLA B5834, April 13, 1682.
66. See, e.g., David Underdown, "The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England," in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge, 1985), 116-36. Evidence from elsewhere also suggests that, for early modern women, inappropriate speech was a catalyst for domestic violence;
67. see, e.g., Roper, The Holy Household, 189. For early modern concern to discipline speech broadly, and women's speech in particular,
68. see Gowing, Domestic Dangers',
69. and Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York, 1997).
70. ADLA B5802, May 10, 1617; ADLA B5815, 1647 (no month or day given).
71. ADLA B5817, November 29, 1657.
72. ADLA B5834, April 13, 1682.
73. ADLA B5834, September 10, 1682.
74. ADLA B5814, May 13, 1626.
75. ADLA B5841, June 17, 1689; ADLA B5825, May 22, 1670.
76. See, e.g., James R. Farr, "The Pure and Disciplined Body: Hierarchy, Morality, and Symbolism in France during the Catholic Reformation," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 215, no. 3 (1991): 391-414;
77. and Peter Stallybrass, "Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed," in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago, 1986), 123-42.
78. For early modern associations between free-flowing hair and prostitution, see, e.g., Farr, "Pure and Disciplined Body."
79. ADLA B5834, April 13, 1682.
80. See, e.g., ADR BP3985, folder 1665, September 7, 1665; ADR BP 3985, folder 1673, September 20, 1673.
81. ADLA B5839, December 6 and 9, 1687.
82. ADLA B5834, April 20, 1682.
83. See, e.g., Jane Jasinski and Linda Williams, eds., Partner Violence: A Comprehensive Review of 20 Years of Research (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1998), 21, who list "risk markers" as substance abuse (esp. alcohol), socioeconomic factors (esp. unemployment or part-time work only), income (esp. poverty), and status incompatibilities (as when a wife works or works more than her partner).
84. The early modern time frame for the use of violence varied widely. Some wives claimed that battery started within days, others that they had been married for long periods before abuse began. A baker's wife, e.g., described how her husband had beaten her "on many occasions so outrageously" since their marriage only three months earlier. In contrast, Marguerite Barry, the wife of a builder, said of her husband of fourteen years that "for some years they lived on good terms," so much so that "they had nine children of whom four remain." Yet about four years earlier "and without anyone knowing why," he developed "such an animosity" for her that he beat her "perpetually" and often chased her from their home so that she had to sleep elsewhere. ADR BP3985, folder 1661, April 19, 1661; ADR BP3985, folder 1656, August 17, 1656. Modern studies suggest that a quick commencement of marital violence is tied not only to general cultural patterns but also to the fact that some men may have had a psychological proclivity to act aggressively, as well as to the generational cycle of children witnessing abuse (or worse, being beaten) and then becoming abusers. It seems that similar preconditions must have existed in early modern marriages, but distinctive factors (such as the willingness to accept the use of force in some circumstances) may shape both the use of violence and wives' perceptions of it.
85. ADLA B5806, February 7, 1624; ADR BP3985, folder 1671, April 7, 1672.
86. ADLA B6150, January 17, 1675.
87. See Farr, Hands of Honor, 144-46;
88. and Julie Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (University Park, PA, 1998), 62-63.
89. Such tensions may have been particularly acute in the households of widows who remarried, especially if they remarried younger men. The widow Anne Marie Delafont said her new husband, François Romain, a journeyman hatmaker who she claimed had "deceived her" by claiming to be his own master when in fact "he was only a simple worker," beat her daily, and, although "he had not brought any property to her house," he had spent four hundred of her livres in the months of their marriage. She claimed Romain threatened every day to beat her if she did not give him her money. ADR BP4045, folder 1720, August 31, 1720. Anecdotal evidence at least suggests that in these marriages where issues about gender and power with regard to control over money were most blatant, domestic violence was especially likely. Other examples include: ADR BP3984, folder 1679, November 18, 1679; ADR BP4045, folder 1691, June 16, 1691; ADR BP4045, November 3, 1700.
90. For the various meanings of whore in early modern England, e.g., see Gowing, Domestic Dangers, esp. 79-105.
91. ADLA B5842, May 31, 1690; ADLA B5840, December 2, 1688; ADR BP4045, folder 1692, October 21, 1685.
92. James R. Farr, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy (Oxford, 1994).
93. ADLA B5838, March 8, 1686.
94. ADLA B6154, December 2, 1684.
95. ADLA B5833, July 31, 1680.
96. ADR BP4045, June 2, 1720.
97. ADR BP3985, folder 1641, December 21, 1641.
98. ADR BP3984, folder 1682, September 22, 1682, and January 9, 1683.
99. ADLA B5825, May 22, 1670.
100. ADLA B5837, December 20, 1685.
101. ADLA B5834, April 13, 1682.
102. ADLA B5849, June 20, 1707.
103. ADR BP4045, folder 1691, May 23, 1699.
104. ADR BP3985, folder 1671, May 26, 1671.
105. ADLA B5831, February 5, 1678.
106. For the myriad interactions between kin in seventeenth-century urban communities, see Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy.
107. ADLA B5814, April 22, 1651; ADLA B5815, January 21, 1647.
108. In contrast, based on a study of Rouen in the 1780s, Phillips, Putting Asunder, 337-38, suggested that gender differences existed in response patterns, with men being more reluctant than women.
109. For these patterns of neighborhood management of conflict, see, e.g., Farr, Hands of Honor, 150-95;
110. and Garrioch, Neighborhood and Community in Paris, 31-55.
111. ADR BP3984, folder 1682, May 13, 1682; ADR BP4045, June 21, 1700; ADR BP4045, folder 1709-1710, October 23, 1710; ADR BP3984, folder 1682, January 9, 1683.
112. This function of convents complicates our notion of the roles they played for women: they might also be used as places where families could detain errant wives or daughters or as sites where women could pursue alternatives to marriage. See Sarah Hanley, "Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France," French Historical Studies 16, no. 1 (1989): 4-27,
113. and "Family and State in Early Modern France: The Marital Law Compact," in Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present, ed. Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert (Oxford, 2000), 61-72;
114. Elizabeth Rapley, Les Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Montreal, 1993).
115. ADR BP4045, January 19, 1690.
116. Marianne Bernard, e.g., the wife of a scale maker, asked to go to a convent outside of town "because it will be cheaper and he is only a worker." Claude-Joseph Ferrière, Dictionnaire de droit et de pratique, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Paris, 1740), 2:862;
117. ADR BP3985, folder 1673, September 25,1673; ADR BP4045, folder 1709-1710, July 2, 1710. Other examples of women using convents as safe houses during various moments in domestic violence cases include: ADR BP3984, October 18, 1674; ADR BP4045, folder 1691, May 23, 1699.
118. ADR BP3984, folder 1682, January 9, 1683; ADR BP3984, folder 1680, August 20, 1680; ADLA B5829, March 19, 1676; ADLA B5830, October 17, 1677.
119. ADLA B5806, January 16, 1626.
120. ADR BP4045, folder 1709-10, December 21, 1710.
121. ADR BP3984, folder 1676, April 12, 1674.
122. ADLA B5831, February 5, 1678; ADR BP3985, folder 1649, January 11, 1649.
123. ADLA B5833, September 23, 1680. The outcome of her court case is unknown, as only the enquête survives.
124. For the patterns of petitioning in the seventeenth century, see Hardwick, "Seeking Separations."
125. For the pre-Revolutionary decade, see Phillips, Family Breakdown, 6-9,
126. and Putting Asunder, 162. The use of petitions of separation of property and person declined from the later seventeenth century, perhaps in part because of the emergence of new alternatives such as policing and the use of royal orders.
127. For these new means in the eighteenth century, see Williams, "Patterns of Conflict";
128. Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault, Le désordre des familles: Lettres de cachet des archives de la Bastille (Paris, 1982).
129. ADR BP4045, folder 1691, August 31, 1691.
130. For uses of separation petitions, see Hardwick, "Seeking Separations."
131. ADR BP3985, folder 1653, July 7, 1652.
132. ADR BP3985, folder 1641, December 21, 1641; ADR BP4045, folder 1720, January 18, 1720.
133. ADLA B5829, January 4, 1676; ADR BP3985, folder 1673, June 20, 1673.
134. Ferrière, Dictionnaire de droit et de pratique, 2:863. Jurists often made these kinds of distinctions - e.g., that a slap or punch was sufficient evidence for separation in high-status families whereas it was not, at least unless often repeated, among ordinary people or that insults, which ordinary people were accustomed to since childhood and to which they were hardened, were a grave matter among elites accustomed to high standards of civility.
135. See Lottin, "Vie et mort du couple," 76.
136. ADR BP4046, June 12, 1640. Other requests from husbands to clarify the civil nature of the suits include: ADR BP3984, folder 1682, September 22, 1682; ADR BP4045, folder 1691, February 22, 1691; ADR BP4045, folder 1691, June 16, 1691.
137. ADR BP3985, folder 1654, February 10, 1654.
138. See also Lottin, "Vie et mort du couple," 75-77.
139. ADLA B5842, May 31, 1690; ADR BP4045, October 21, 1685; ADR BP3985, November, 1668.
140. ADLA B5840, October 2, 1688.
141. For servants giving conflicting testimonies that supported claims of both spouses, see, e.g., ADR BP3984, August 1683 (no day given); ADLA B5837, June 28, 1685.
142. ADLA B5842, May 31, 1690.
143. Servants' accounts of these episodes were graphic. In the vineyard, e.g., a servant recalled that Delaroche asked his wife "if she wanted to get fucked by these country buggers and said he wanted to fuck her in front them"; she declined, citing "modesty"; they argued, and, "calling her names, he pushed her to the ground," and, "in the presence of the witness and fifteen or sixteen peasants had sex with her."
144. ADR BP4045, January 18, 1720; ADLA B5842, May 31, 1690; ADR BP3984, folder 1683, June 11, 1683.
145. ADLA B5840, December 2, 1688; ADLA B5842, May 31, 1690.
146. It seems impossible to establish any usable quantitative sense of the pervasiveness of battery at any historical moment. The debate over whether domestic violence increased or decreased over the long term is filled with pitfalls. While we may tend to assume that domestic violence has become less common (at least in the casual use of mundane force that early modern communities broadly tolerated), contemporary experts in intimate violence note that, even with zero tolerance legislation, wives and neighbors in many communities in practice remain reluctant to define a wide range of abusive behavior as "violence," and force often has to be repeated and extensive before intervention is sought. I thank Jeana Lungwitz for this point.
147. For a forceful statement about the power of continuity in gendered patterns in another realm, women's work, see Judith Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 (Oxford, 1996), esp. 6-8, 152-57.
148. Studies of battery in Britain for the early modern era and the nineteenth century, e.g., all show a variety of financial issues to have been at stake in domestic violence, but none of these focused specifically on loans as so often in the French case. See Amussen, "'Being Stirred to Much Unquietness'";
149. Clark, Struggle for the Breeches;
150. Hunt, "Wife Beating";
151. Leneman, "'A Tyrant and Tormentor'";
152. Ross, "'Fierce Questions and Taunts'";
153. and Tomes, "A 'Torrent of Abuse.'"
154. For example, early modern Venetian women could apparently use cases for separations of person and property (still heard in church courts in Italy) to protect themselves against battery, while women in colonial Connecticut could not get divorces on the ground of cruelty, however serious, until the mid-eighteenth century. Ferraro, "The Power to Decide";
155. Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut. 1639-1789 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995), 105-56.
156. For the development of breadwinning and housekeeping identities in working families as key structures in conflicts between spouses, and the centrality of failure to perform domestic tasks as the major rhetorical focus, see Clark, Struggle for the Breeches ;
157. Ross, "'Fierce Questions and Taunts'";
158. and Tomes, "A 'Torrent of Abuse.'"
159. Susan Amussen suggests that, in early modern England, "women most vulnerable to domestic violence were those cut off from the community - usually women of gentry status." Amussen, '"Being Stirred to Much Unquietness,'" 81. Elite women were not cut off, but their distinctive circumstances do suggest, as I argue here, that the experiences and resources of elite wives who were battered differed from those of women of lower status.
160. For the class bias of legislation to police domestic violence, see Ross, Love and Toil, 86.
161. Margaret Hunt has argued that key changes in attitudes in working families happened as early as the 1690s in England, but I find no indications of such a shift in France by that point. Hunt's sample includes only about ten cases. Hunt, "Wife Beating."
162. See Garrioch, Neighborhood and Community in Paris, esp. 5 (for refusal to help if a husband was presumed to be the batterer) and 80 (for neighbors deferring to kin in regulating domestic disputes).
163. Phillips, Putting Asunder, 337-38, argued that male neighbors were unwilling to intervene in Rouen in the 1790s.
164. For arguments based on Britain that neighbors were slow to help in the nineteenth century and that wives identified themselves as the cause of their husbands' abuse by the mid-nineteenth century, see, e.g., Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, 260-63;
165. Phillips, Putting Asunder;
166. Ross, "'Fierce Questions and Taunts'";
167. Tomes, "A 'Torrent of Abuse.'"
168. Eliza E. Ferguson, "Vengeance! Gender and Intimate Violence in Fin-de-Siècle Paris" (PhD diss., Duke University, 2000).