Elizabeth Foyster's study of marital violence in England from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries is innovative in a number of ways. Although she is treading on ground covered by other historians, she clearly sets out what is different about her book. Diverging from Lawrence Stone's take on marriage breakdown, Foyster examines a broader cross-section of society and prefers to focus on cases of mundane and nonlethal violence rather than sensationalized ones. Her book is also a useful complement to Anna Clark's work on domestic violence, in that Foyster examines the middle as well as working classes. And last, Foyster's examination of the long eighteenth century allows her to trace back some of the trends and attitudes that James Hammerton has identified as particularly Victorian.
Foyster derives her main body of evidence from over two hundred cases of marriage separation or restitution brought before the London Consistory (church) court and the Court of Arches (the appellate church court for the province of Canterbury). She provides a clear and useful discussion of the legal recourse a wife had following marital violence. This included seeking a marriage separation in a church court on the grounds of cruelty, complaining to a local magistrate or JP who could punish her husband for assault or breaking the peace, and separation by a private deed that could be enforced in the Court of Chancery.
Foyster takes pains to define normative versus cruel marital violence in her time period. She reminds us that some violence within marriage was acceptable, so contemporaries concerned themselves with violence that crossed the acceptable line. Foyster argues that definitions of cruel violence changed between 1660 and the 1850s. Cruel violence went from being defined almost entirely as physical violence to a wide-ranging category that included threats of violence, confinement, material and economic deprivation, and the consequences of violence. Another change Foyster finds is that over time class became essential to interpreting and understanding marital violence. This did not just mean that contemporaries considered working-class men more violent, it also meant that they believed genteel women suffered more from cases of marital violence than their laboring sisters.
Another one of Foyster's primary contributions is considering marital violence as a part of family history. She shows how marital violence involved more than the two spouses and had an effect on children and other kin. Before the nineteenth century, however, there was very little recognition of how marital violence affected children and of its consequences. This was despite conduct literature that emphasized how children were easily influenced and prone to imitation. Foyster provides examples of husbands harming their children as an indirect means of tormenting their wives, and of husbands setting their children against their wives, encouraging them to disrespect or even hit their mothers. However, children also protected their mothers from their abusive fathers, as well as informing on their fathers and testifying against them in court. This section would be more compelling if the examples Foyster cited were of children testifying against their fathers, but instead she cites children testifying against their stepfathers. This seems to have been a different situation, and one that would have required less divided loyalty on the part of a child, who could side more easily with a mother over a stepfather.
Foyster also challenges the hypothesis that marital violence became more private over time and that this was aided by a decline of community, especially in urban areas. She argues that although marital violence was domestic, it was not private, and proves this by showing the consistent involvement of servants, kin, friends, and neighbors in court cases involving marital violence. Foyster illustrates how kin in particular intervened in cases of marital violence and how a wife's birth family offered her protection, assistance, and shelter. Intriguingly, intervention did not always help a woman. Husbands could become more aggravated and jealous of wives who had relatives and friends to assist them, and this led some to try to confine their wives. Kin also did not always want a woman to separate from her husband. Foyster says that separated wives were shunned by society and that families and communities did not know what to do with these women. This may have been true of genteel women, but I am not persuaded that separated wives were pariahs among the laboring classes. Foyster successfully shows that the privatization of marital violence was not the norm among middling and working people, although her evidence does not tell us if this held true higher up the social scale.
Another issue Foyster examines at length is the custody of children in cases of marital violence and separation. If a wife chose to separate from her spouse she automatically lost custody of her offspring. This was true up until 1839 when middle-class women pushed through the Custody of Infants Act, which allowed mothers to petition for custody of children up to the age of seven. When reading this section the question that sprang to my mind was not why did a woman not leave a violent marriage, but rather what mother would leave her children to a violent husband? While our modern, feminist sensibilities view a woman who leaves an abusive marriage as strong and heroic, this perhaps blinds us to how contemporaries could view such a woman as an “unnatural mother” for abandoning her children along with her violent spouse. And while Foyster does an excellent job of showing the ties between marital violence and children, it also would be edifying to look at instances of marital violence against barren wives.
Foyster is not interested in depicting wives as merely victims of marital violence. She devotes a chapter to how wives resisted violent husbands: through writing about it, practicing religious piety, taking to their beds, drinking, physically fighting back, abusing them verbally, and exposing their husbands’ violence to others. While showing wives fighting back is a significant contribution, it is odd in a book examining legal separation cases that Foyster spends so little time examining the ramifications of wives bringing court cases against husbands.
Foyster's interpretations are important and innovative. Her book is based on over two hundred court cases; however, I never got a feel for this evidence. Her narrative device of returning to two legal cases that frame the beginning and end of her time period leads her to overemphasize these two cases to the detriment of other examples. Foyster's arguments could benefit from some quantification of her cases and findings. I mention this because I think Foyster's book carries much historical significance, but it could be better supported by her research.
