Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy Against Family Violence From Colonial Times to the Present

• NCJ Number: 117154
• Author(s): E Pleck
• Date Published: 1987
• Length: 273 pages
• Sale Source: Oxford University Press, Inc
• Publication Type: Historical Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This book traces the ebbs and flows in public attention to the social issue of family violence through various periods of American history from colonial times to the present.

Abstract

Chapter 1 examines the first American reform against family violence, a battery of unique laws against child and wife abuse in the New England colonies beginning in 1641. As chapter 2 demonstrates, greater maternal authority in the home led to a decline in whipping as an acceptable form of corporal punishment among the educated middle class, although it remained the legitimate form of child discipline among most Americans. The feminist movement of the 1850's, chronicled in chapter 3, exposed the abuses that occurred in the home and sought women's entrance into the public world. The punitive approach toward family violence peaked in the last third of the 19th century. The three reform efforts against domestic violence of that era defined it as a crime requiring stern punishments. The largest and most successful of these resulted in the formation of the Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The reasons for their founding and the results of their policies are discussed in chapter 4. Chapter 5 examines the smaller-scale feminist and temperance programs to protect battered women and incest victims. The efforts of male lawyers, district attorneys, and other law enforcement officials are detailed in chapter 6. Chapter 7 describes the specialized tribunals for children or families founded in the early 20th century. These courts furthered the decline of interest in family violence already under way. Psychoanalytic thought influenced American clinical practice beginning in the 1920's. These ideas, as chapter 8 indicates, relegated abuse to childish fantasy. Chapter 9 examines the change in this trend in the early 1960's, as the largest single era of reform focused on the treatment and prevention of child abuse. Chapter 10 reviews the feminists' battered women's movement and their significant innovation, shelters for abused women and their children. Chapter notes, subject index.