Mapping the Language of Male Partner Violence: An Historical Examination of Power,Meaning,and Ambivalence

A Husband's Right to Beat His Wife

Since as far back as the Roman Era, historians have noted the presence in society of men using violence toward their female romantic partners (Sewell, 1989). These premodern societies were firmly patriarchal, which “deemed a wife the property of her husband and therefore subject to his control” (Sewell, 1989, p. 985). The Christian Church was a key field that promoted this understanding of a husband's right to control his wife, even giving authority to husbands to sentence their wives to death for not showing Christian virtues of “docility, chastity and passivity” (Sewell, 1989, p. 986). In the 1400s, the Catholic text Rules of Marriage outlined a husband's right to “stand as judge of his wife and to beat her with a stick upon commission of an offense” (Sewell, 1989, p. 986). While the 1500s brought about new understandings of marriage as a relationship based on companionship rather than just male ownership, it was acceptable for husbands to use violence as a way to control their wives (Lentz, 1999).

Over the next three centuries (1500–1700s), key shifts occurred in how “wife-beating”—as it was commonly termed—was understood by society. The first key shift saw a public condemnation of husbands killing or using extreme forms of violence toward their wives. Due to a lack of any police infrastructure, historians note that neighbors would often intervene if a husband's use of violence was deemed extreme. This meant that these social fields—the community itself—contributed to a growing belief that it was unacceptable for men to use severe violence toward their wives (see Amussen, 1994). It should be noted though that these neighborly interventions only occurred among the common class due to these communities living in close confines to one another. Amussen (1994, p. 81) notes that the gentry class did not appear to experience these types of bystander involvements, making wealthier women more “vulnerable” to “wife-beating” at this time.

Other key fields—again the Church and the establishment of the judiciary (courts or magistrates)—also redefined a husband's right to use violence toward his wife. Various magistrates across both the United States and the United Kingdom were vocal in their disdain of “wife-beating,” with a number of courts (e.g., outlawing “wife-beating” at this time. For example, in the mid-1600s laws were passed in Massachusetts and New Plymouth Bay that made “wife-beating” unlawful (Sewell, 1989). Even though this changed public perception of “wife-beating,” courts rarely enforced punishments (Sewell, 1989). This was for a number of reasons: court proceedings and divorce applications, for one, were expensive; and even when cases were brought to court, magistrates tended to prefer families stayed intact (Hunt, 1992; Sewell, 1989). In a similar contradictory fashion, the Church at this time was also vocal against husbands using violence toward their wives, however many also prefaced this with circumstances where “wife-beating” was deemed an “allowable punishment” (Sewell, 1989, p. 987), for example, to keep an “orderly household” (Amussen, 1994, p. 77).

This exoneration of certain degrees of violence was further stabilized in the eighteenth century by key figures within the British judiciary. William Blackstone and Francis Buller both wrote on this topic, with Buller famously coining the phrase—Rule of Thumb—a standard of measurement that gave husbands the right to use violence toward their wives as long as any implement used was no thicker than his thumb. All of these legitimations of men's violence “served to strengthen the legal base of patriarchy” (Amussen, 1994, p. 83), which is turn “gave greater power to husbands” (Amussen, 1994, p. 72).

Therefore, while male partner violence did have a discursive reality at this time—in that it was thinkable with different fields in society making known its negative effects on women—it was dealt with in very inconsistent and contradictory ways with men having substantial freedom in their use of violence toward their wives (Lentz, 1999). One can assert that at the level of habitus, women's experiences of “wife-beating” and their ability to find support was complicated. While certain figures within the Church and the judiciary condemned this form of violence, finding help in the form of divorce proceedings or having their husbands punished was rare. Historians also note that women were more likely to be further disadvantaged if they did seek help. For example, Moore (2002) outlines how women would often experience extreme poverty if their husbands were either imprisoned or fined for their violent behavior. Because of this, many women chose either not to press charges or if they did were unable to keep bringing their recidivist husbands to justice.

Misogyny, Paternalism, and First-Wave Feminism

Across the nineteenth century, more changes took place in how society addressed “wife-beating.” Across the UK and the US (the US took many of its cues during this time from English Common Law—see Sewell, 1989), two distinct and contradictory viewpoints about “wife-beating” surfaced. These viewpoints, for the most part, surfaced from judicial fields at the time.

The first viewpoint, principally stemming from the UK, was highly misogynistic in its evaluation of “wife-beating.” In his 1877 handbook Principles of Punishment, English lawyer Edward Cox wrote that most women deserved the violence they experienced from their husbands and that “unprovoked brutality and cruelty to helpless and submissive women” was rare (Tomes, 1978). As Tomes (1978, p. 339) notes, “many magistrates” adhered to this belief, which in turn led to a lack of punishments given to violent husbands. Fueling this viewpoint was an enduring support of the Rule of Thumb, that continued to dominate public understanding of how husbands could treat their wives. In the US, a number of states (namely Mississippi in 1824 and a collection of southern United States thereafter) even wrote the Rule of Thumb into law. It should be noted though that this was not universal across the US; courts in the more progressive state of California, for example, openly rejected the Rule of Thumb around the same time (Lentz, 1999).

The second viewpoint contested Cox's assertion, openly condemning this form of violence. In the UK, a dominant proponent of this was Thomas Holmes—a Police Court Missionary in London. He argued that men ought to be paternalistic toward their wives and, therefore, not use violence. According to Holmes, violence of this kind was “unmanly and cowardly” (Tomes, 1978, p. 339). Holmes’ view was profoundly classist in nature, however. It presumed that working-class men were the main perpetrators of violence toward wives. This classist belief was strengthened at this time in the UK (and in the US—see Peterson del Mar, 1996) as working-class men in general were seen as engendering brutish, “ruffian” and immoral qualities (Tomes, 1978, p. 339).

Holmes’ discourse influenced a number of judicial measures put in place to protect women from their violent husbands (Tomes, 1978); these changes however did not occur till the latter part of the 1800s. In the UK, an amendment to the Matrimonial Cause Act in 1878 made separation a legitimate avenue for women to pursue and in 1888 the Wifebeaters Act was passed outlawing this from of violence. Also at this time, The Society of the Protection of Women was set up in Britain with the mandate of addressing the welfare of women: “wife-beating” was one such issue that the Society addressed (Tomes, 1978). By the latter part of the 1800s, the US (and most other Western nations—Sewell, 1989) illegalized “wife-beating” including a widespread abolishment of Rule of Thumb clauses from law (Lentz, 1999; Sewell, 1989). Even with these important changes, “wife-beating” continued to endure. As Cyr (2015) explains, even with new legislation, there was an overarching tolerance of “wife-beating” across the west, which meant that many men were never prosecuted.

While the US followed much of English Common Law during this century (Sewell, 1989), it is important to note that settler gender politics meant there were additional variations in how “wife-whipping”—as it became commonly termed in the US (Peterson del Mar, 1996)—was dealt with at this time. Settler men principally showed their manliness through being self-disciplined and self-sustaining (rather than paternalistic, as promoted by Holmes-esque discourses in the UK). These virtues, however, were highly contradictory when it came to social attitudes toward “wife-whipping.” For example, within settler communities, giving into violent rages was seen as the antithesis of how a self-disciplined husband should act. In contradiction, however, the masculine virtue of self-discipline and sustainability made violence of this kind, at times, acceptable as it aligned in many ways with a husband's duty to protect and discipline those dependent on him. To further complicate how “wife-whipping” was understood in these settler communities, manliness was also associated with being rugged and tough “frontiersmen” (Gordon, 1988, p. 255). This construction gave men some added freedom to control their wives using violence. As Peterson del Mar (1996, p. 10) notes, “male violence commonly served as a tool to enforce male authority.”

The Church through-out the west, although still a powerful field at this time, appeared to play less of a role in historical accounts of how “wife-beating” was addressed in the 1800s. This may have been due to the privatization of religion during this century alongside the increased work courts (that were now increasingly secular) were carrying out to address this form of violence (Ruether, 1984). In saying this, however, the Church and its doctrines regarding divorce did influence discursive constructions of “wife-beating” during the 1800s. Therefore, while access to divorce was easier for women in the 1800s (Lentz, 1999), the Church while largely opposing “wife-beating” were also vocal in their disapproval of divorce. Therefore, “women's flight from the violence” (Peterson del Mar, 1996, p. 44) was not condoned. For example, in his 1880 Sermon to Women Reverend Knox-Little asserted that divorce was never justified, even “if [the husband] be a bad or wicked man” (Gage, 1893, p. 493).

Even though women at this time were largely seen and treated as passive to men, this did not deter many from resisting dominant discourses surrounding men's privilege and ownership over women (Sewell, 1989). Prominently, this resistance was seen in the activities of first wave of feminism that swept across the western world from around the mid-1800s. In 1848, feminist reformers in the US held the Seneca Falls Convention, which was the first convention to address women's rights (Lentz, 1999). Here, the Declaration of Sentiments (Stanton, 1848)—outlining the ways in which women had been oppressed by men and a declaration of intent for emancipating women from patriarchal rule—was presented and signed by attendees of the conference. As the nineteenth century progressed, feminist voices continued to grow across the UK, the US, and other western countries.

Temperance and suffrage were the most popularly recognized issues that this first wave of feminism tackled. More taboo issues, like violence in the home, tended to be addressed within broader discussions around legal rights of women (Aitken, 2007; Gordon, 1988; Lentz, 1999; Pleck, 1983; Sewell, 1989). Feminists were not naïve though, to think that elevating women's legal status would automatically protect women from “wife-beating.” In fact, many acknowledged that giving more rights to women may increase men's use of violence as a form of control (Lentz, 1999). The main messages feminists brought to the public arena regarding “wife-beating” were two-fold: one, that women needed more protection from their violent husbands (feminists tended to see working-class women as most vulnerable (Aitken, 2007; Lentz, 1999); and two, that this form of violence was unequivocally caused by the “rule of men” (Lentz, 1999, p. 19). Here, a feminist critique of the patriarchy in relation to men's ability to use violence toward women was now established.

Even with this broad consensus, different feminist groups addressed “wife-beating” in different ways during this era. One prominent group of feminists active at this time came from the emerging “bourgeois culture” in the west (Peterson del Mar, 1996, p. 47). These conservative feminists created a platform to address issues around violence prevention mainly through their work in setting up protection agencies for women and children. However, historians note that this group was more active in bringing violence toward children to a public platform than an awareness of “wife-beating” (Gordon, 1988; Pleck, 1983). This is not to say that women's rights were largely ignored by this group. Because these feminists were predominantly active members of the Protestant Church, their overarching opposition to divorce led them to support new legislation and policies to protect women from male partner violence; the aim here was to make marriage more tolerable for women (Gordon, 1988; Pleck, 1983).

Another feminist organization active throughout most of the western world at this time was the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) (Aitken, 2007). WCTU members also tended to be conservative, wealthy women and as the name suggests, their focus was mainly on men's consumption of alcohol (Gordon, 1988; Pleck, 1983). The WCTU addressed “wife-beating” by arguing that men's use of alcohol was the mitigating factor (Aitken, 2007; Gordon, 1988; Pleck, 1983). This approach tended to frame “wife-beating” as an individualized problem driven by men's pathology, which in turn silenced more critical discussions around gendered societal power. In addition to temperance, the WCTU—like their other feminist counterparts involved in protection agencies—also reflected the protestant–conservative discourse surrounding marriage. They voiced their disapproval of divorce and saw the preservation of marriage as an important moral standpoint even when male partner violence was present (Gordon, 1988; Pleck, 1983).

Liberal feminists were also active at this time and appeared to have a more woman-focussed agenda. Unlike their protestant–conservative counterparts, liberal feminists lobbied in favor of divorce in order to help wives leave violent husbands. This was in line with their liberal agenda to address inequality amongst men and women. Their emphasis on divorce, however, meant that their discussions surrounding “wife-beating” and its detrimental effects on women were more peripheral and never gained significant momentum during their active years (Pleck, 1983).

These new authorized voices stemming from the field of first-wave feminism all contributed to a more critically gendered thinkability of “wife-beating” at this time, which would have made it easier for women experiencing “wife-beating” to find support (Gordon, 1988). Feminist discourses, however, still had to compete with nonfeminist voices at this time. As has been outlined, competing discourses surrounding “wife-beating” were either paternalistic, casting women as “passive creatures” who needed men to protect them (Tomes, 1978, p. 342) or were more overtly misogynistic, seeing women as pariah-like “fallen angels” (Tomes, 1978, p. 339) who were both aggressive and deserving of men's violence. Therefore, at the level of habitus, women's ability to make sense of the violence they were experiencing and even being able to find avenues of support would have been complicated by the many conflicting ways in which “wife-beating” was understood at the time (Aitken, 2007; Gordon, 1988; Lentz, 1999; Peterson del Mar, 1992).

An Era of Silence

This era of feminist debate and awareness of male partner violence was not sustained (Gordon, 1988; Pleck, 1983), which aligned with an organizational shift within the very protection agencies that conservative feminists had set up. From the early 1900s, feminists were replaced by a new wave of middle-class professionals who introduced what was seen by many as a more “scientific” management-style approach to running these agencies (Gordon, 1988, p. 62). This new field of social services was, therefore, seen as a more efficient in comparison to how conservative feminists managed these agencies up until this point.

These new “professional” social agencies became the authority on all matters pertaining to the family unit (Gordon, 1988). One characteristic of this new field was the introduction of case work reports, which quickly became a way to surveil families who were seen to come from the underclass (largely made up of immigrant communities) in society (Gordon, 1988). A key thread throughout their rhetoric was the notion of the “undeserving poor,” which largely targeted mothers. This was because, more so than in previous years, child neglect was now discursively attached to the notion of the transgressive and deviant mother (Gordon, 1988). This misogynistic focus meant that many women experiencing male partner violence were unable to seek help for to fear of being prosecuted themselves or losing custody of their children (Gordon, 1988).

This focus away from feminist discourses of male partner violence was also led by a shift in what constituted male privilege in the home. While the early 1900s saw a brief emergence of a “new sensibility of domesticity” (Gordon, 1988, p. 41), which included a promotion of the gentle-man—praised for being a devoted but detached family man (Gordon, 1988; Peterson del Mar, 1996), a more controlling version of male privilege took hold across the 1920s and 1930s. Men were no longer praised for being gentlemen in their families; instead, men were encouraged to exert more control and authority over their wives (Gordon, 1988). This newfound right for men to be the authority over their families was further entrenched by families becoming more ameliorated as urbanization and the privileging of the nuclear family took hold throughout western countries. (Peterson del Mar, 1996). This shift to a more individualized way of life meant that many women did not have the same community ties and social bonds with other women, which in turn created an environment whereby male partner violence became a private matter (Peterson del Mar, 1996).

Divorce was still a difficult option for women to contemplate. The church at this time still condemned divorce and the misogynism that was building in the social services field meant that women who did leave violent marriages also risked being positioned as transgressive, immoral, and to blame for any “dysfunction” in their family unit. Gordon (1988) outlines the following struggles these women faced within the early decades of the twentieth century:

Nowhere was the tension between social work standards and values, and client's needs and possibilities, greater than in the case of single mother families. Single mothers were the most wretched group of clients. This was partly because they were the poorest but also because they were in a double bind as they struggled to meet the contradictory expectations of raising and providing for children in a society organised on the premise of male breadwinning and female domesticity. (Gordon, 1988, p. 83)

This would have resulted in many women enduring a conflicted, confusing and fear-filled engagement with habitus at this time.

Women to Blame

In keeping with this developing narrative of transgressive women, the period between World War II and the 1960s saw a more sustained period of misogynism take hold across the global west. Not only confined to the field of social services, this woman-blaming discourse became widespread across other fields of action. As Schechter (1982, p. 27) remarks, “the police, courts, hospitals, and social service agencies cooperated, although not conspiratorially, in defining the abuser's behavior as legitimate or insignificant and the victim's behavior as crazy, provocative, or reformable.” This new way of making sense of male partner violence was particularly manufactured by psychiatrists and psychologists who authored a range of journal articles on the matter (see Faulk, 1974; Lion, 1977; Shainess, 1977; Snell et al., 1964). These medical professionals made up a new dominant field of medicine that now claimed authority on issues relating to the family.

This field shifted how society understood male partner violence in a number of ways that had detrimental consequences on women at the time. How male partner violence was labeled, was one of these ways. Language used to describe male partner violence now became euphemized by medical professionals (see more Gordon, 1988, p 284) with lexical arrangements like “marital discord” (see Snell et al., 1964) and “marital dysfunction” (see Shainess, 1977) becoming commonly used. These terms not only denied the gravity of male partner violence but also erased the “doer” of this form of violence from medical discourses relating to this problem.

This euphemistic treatment of male partner violence by the medical field also coincided with a promotion of a suite of misogynistic narratives relating to the problem. While many medical professionals (Faulk, 1974; Lion, 1977; Snell et al., 1964) agreed that anger manifested within men who were violent toward their wives, it was largely suggested that these men were provoked into being violent by their masculine, aggressive, and/or controlling wives. Thus, it was suggested that women brought “discord” into the home while men simply reacted to it (Snell et al., 1964). As Faulk (1974) argued, a wife's provocation (characteristics of what he termed “a quarrelsome wife”) was a dominant reason why a “dependent passive husband” (p. 121) became violent. Lion (1977, p. 129) also drew on the notion of provocation: “The phenomenology of wife-battering involves the victim playing a major role. Recognition of this is mandatory, and should not be seen as pejorative…the issues involve the ambivalences and pathologies of both partners.” Shainess (1977) argued specifically that a woman's predisposition to premenstrual mood imbalances was difficult for husbands to manage and could provoke frustration and anger. Shainess, therefore, recommended wives ascertain the role they played in causing the violence in order to correct their behavior and prevent the violence from happening again.

Women were also blamed for the violence they were experiencing in the home because of what many doctors deemed to be their sexual frigidity. Shainess (1977, pp. 117–118) recommended: “If the husband can be considered to be ‘sexually addicted’ or compulsive in his need for sex, then while not desirable for his wife, nevertheless, if she desires the marriage to continue, it makes for a more tolerable marriage to be compliant…if she wants the marriage to continue, she is the one who must make the greatest effort” (pp. 117–118). Social workers at the time also singled out women's frigidity as a root cause of men's violence. This was a view very different from the earlier Victorian days where social workers often supported wives who had a sexually demanding and violent husband (Gordon, 1988). Some medical professionals also maintained that women wanted to be mistreated by their romantic partners (Lion, 1977; Snell et al., 1964). As Lion (1977) proposed: “some women fear kind husbands and gentle men” (p. 132) … [while] some women need someone who they can feel sorry for “as a defence to protect her from her own anger and assertiveness” (p. 133).

The medical field also perpetuated explanations for why husbands used violence. Largely it was argued that a husband's actions were due to pathological forces external to his control (O’Neill, 1998). For example, Faulk (1974) surmised that men were most likely to be violent because of stress. The other predominant rationale for a husband to be violent, in Faulk's assessment, was mental illness. These pathological frames worked to exonerate violent men, and in turn also fed into an individualistic discourse that would span the next 100 years: if men could not help being violent, then in was up to the women to solve the problem. This made women's behavior change the focus of medical recommendations for treating the problem and in turn formed the basis of an enduring narrative—that women are culpable for staying in violent marriages (O’Neill, 1998).

Historians note that during this period of medicalized woman-blaming, male partner violence increased in frequency while also being treated largely as a private matter (Peterson del Mar, 1996). Women, therefore, faced huge difficulty getting support that could actually keep them safe. At the level of habitus, men were enabled to be violent within their romantic relationships yet women who spoke out or sought help from doctors, were vilified. In this way, male partner violence has less of a discursive reality than in previous eras and therefore, became primarily “unthinkable” during this time.

Feminist Rediscovery

This period of unthinkability was not sustained; by the 1970s a groundswell of second-wave feminism—and the emergence of the Battered Women's Movement—created an important platform for reintroducing critical gendered definitions of male partner violence into public debate. Feminism, at this time, had a lot of work to do unraveling the misogynism embedded in definitions of male partner violence from the previous three decades. This work was started by feminists involved to the Women's Liberation Movement: a sub-set of feminists (mostly from radical and socialist feminist groups) who not only fought for women's rights to equal voice but carried out a strong political agenda that addressed gendered roles and power in society. As a political movement, it did more than just address equality; it created a platform to publicly address the privatized experiences of women that were oppressive: namely women's denial of rights over their own bodies and women's experiences of motherhood, domesticity, and violence. This political work was pivotal in reintroducing male partner violence as a discursive reality (Schechter, 1982).

One of the key challenges the field of feminism at this time faced in the campaign against male partner violence was around changing the way the problem was talked about and therefore, understood. As feminist scholar Kersti Yllo (2005) comments, “the most fundamental feminist insight into all of this is quite simple: domestic violence cannot be adequately understood unless gender and power are taken into account” (p. 19). Michele Bograd (1988, pp. 13–14) broke this down into more detail:

Four major dimensions are common to all feminist perspectives on wife abuse: (1). The explanatory utility of the constructs of gender and power; (2). The analysis of the family as a historically situated social institution; (3). The crucial important of understanding and validating women's experiences; (4). Employing scholarship for women.

The first task feminists tackled was to shift public thinking from how male partner violence was currently understood—that this type of violence was a private marital matter usually caused by women's behavior. As Loseke et al. (2005, p. x, emphasis added) outline, “encouraging the general public to condemn violence therefore required changing the idea that violence inside homes was ‘normal’ and inconsequential. One mechanism for changing these attitudes was to name the problem” in ways that no longer de-validated women's experiences (see also, Schechter, 1982).

Terms like “wife-beating” and “wife abuse” (Yllo, 1988) and the more inclusive term “woman battering” (Pagelow, 1981; Schechter, 1982) were (re)introduced by feminists with the endeavor to discursively relocate violence in relationships within a gendered context: that is, with women's experiences of men's violence as a gendered phenomenon at the core of its understanding (Sev’er, 2002). In doing so, these terms also counteracted woman-blaming discourses of the previous eras by placing the “doers” of this gendered violence—men—as key to how the problem was understood. There were variations in terminology. These renamings and redefinitions of male partner violence by this feminist movement helped transform this form of violence from a “subject of public shame and misery to an object of public concern” (Tierney, 1982, p. 210).

Coinciding with feminists’ renamings of the problem was their role in the development and setting up of women's shelters. While there were shelter-like places made available to women during the first wave of feminism (Gordon, 1988; Pleck, 1983), the shelters of the 1970s were set up in far greater numbers and were more active in promoting feminist ideologies. These shelters were originally spaces for women to collectively meet and discuss a wide-range of subjects relating to their gendered experiences; in time, these spaces became specifically sites of refuge for women from violence as this was what women primarily wanted to talk about. Here, a politics of talk was emerging within shelters, which in turn meant that terms like the “battered woman” started to become publicly recognized (Schechter, 1988). This had great benefits for women: at the level of habitus, the victim-blaming language of the previous era was now being challenged, which in turn provided women with the ability to speak out, collectively, making shelters a key location for the “personal is political” discourse of the 1970s to develop (see Ahrens, 1980; Ferraro, 1983; Schechter, 1982, 1988).

Feminist scholarship concerning male partner violence prevention also emerged at this time, with a growing number of feminist researchers vocalizing a critical gendered discourse in addressing the problem (Dobash & Dobash, 1979; Pagelow, 1981; Schechter, 1982; Yllo, 1988). As discussed previously, the authorities of the 1930s–1960s were influenced by misogynistic research conducted within medical and psychology disciplines (Faulk, 1974; Lion, 1977; Shainess, 1977; Snell, Rosenwald & Robey, 1964). Feminist researchers, therefore, tasked themselves to confront and dispel the layers of misogyny that founded these “myths” (see Pagelow, 1981). Stark et al. (1979, p. 463), for example, presented a valuable critique of medical reporting, which they argued promoted “female brutalization” in the ways in which women experiencing male partner violence were pathologized as being mentally unwell. Chesler (1971, p. 746) extended this critique to argue that medicalized knowledge prevented women's ability to seek appropriate help and support due to the ways in which medical professionals presented themselves as “benevolent authorities” in women's lives: “That both psychotherapy and marriage, the two major socially approved institutions for white middleclass women, function similarly, ie. as vehicles for personal ‘salvation’ through the presence of an understanding and benevolent (male) authority.”

Feminist researchers were also vocal against medical discourses that positioned women as to blame for their experiences of male partner violence. Dobash and Dobash (1979) described the climate of this discourse in the 1970s: “The idea that nagging provokes or causes the violence is not merely a justification provided by the man for his behaviour, it is very much a part of our cultural beliefs and is also used by researchers and representatives of social agencies to explain ‘wife-beating’ or to justify their own actions or inactions” (p. 133). Another discourse emerging at this time blamed women who chose to stay in violent relationships, placing the responsibility for ending the violence with women. Feminist researchers counteracted this victim-blaming discourse by breaking down the complexities of why some women stay and why some women leave violent male partners. As Schechter (1982, p. 20) lamented:

They forget that women weigh their alternatives and constantly make choices; any woman might decide to stay after asking herself, “What is it like to be beaten twice a year compared to living alone with two children, penniless?” If aid is offered and turned down, friends are angry; few are able to understand or feel sympathy for the woman who is ambivalent about leaving her husband. When people do not know what to do or lack resources to meaningful assist, their helplessness may turn to anger, not always at the circumstances, but at the person requesting help. They cope with this anger by blaming the victim.

This feminist critique confronted the masochistic narratives embedded in medical discourse: that if women stay in violent relationships, they must have a desire to experience violence (see Bograd, 1988; Pagelow, 1981; Schechter, 1982)—a “willing sufferer” (Pagelow, 1981, p. 55).

One key outcome of feminist reauthorizing of male partner violence across the 1970s and 1980s was the emergence of a more inclusive and gendered global definition of the problem (Abrar et al., 2000). On the global stage, this was marked by the UN Commission on the Status of Women, in 1992, formally defining all violence against women as “any act, omission, controlling behaviour or threat, in any sphere, which results in or is likely to result in physical, sexual or psychological injury to women” (Marcus, 1994, p. 30). Here, a formal recognition of gender-based violence that need not only be physical, was declared on the global stage (Marcus, 1994).

This widening of the definition of male partner violence coincided with the introduction of a new theoretical paradigm, also informed by feminist activity of the time, that would prove to be influential in reframing how male partner violence is understood (Dobash & Dobash, 1992). This paradigm, known commonly as the Power and Control Wheel, was devised by the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in the 1980s—a ground-breaking project that shifted the focus from woman-blaming rhetoric to bettering legal and judicial responses to prosecuting and rehabilitating violent men that would have widespread take-up across the world (Dobash & Dobash, 1992). The Wheel itself has been pivotal in a number of ways: it is unambiguously gendered, which adds clarity around what this type of violence actually looks like and it recognizes psychological and other nonphysical coercions as part of this form of violence that women experience. It is still used widely today.

At this time, legislation was also being introduced in many countries recognizing this full suite of violence—physical, psychological, and sexual—women face in their romantic relationships (Ortiz-Barreda & Vives-Cases, 2013). In Aotearoa/New Zealand, for example, the Domestic Violence Act was passed in the mid-1990s that added some definitional clarity around the problem: According to this Act, “domestic violence is any physical, sexual and psychological abuse, the last of which includes, but is not limited to intimidation, harassment, damage to property, threats of violence and committing acts of violence in front of children” (Law Commission, 2001, p. 2). Prior to this, violence in the home was still largely considered a private matter and while there was an earlier piece of legislation in New Zealand that did have some protection measures in place for violence in the home, the Domestic Violent Act 1995 had a more targeted and definable set of principles in place as well as clearer and streamlined procedures like compulsory police reporting and greater ease of applying for protection orders. The 1995 Act also recognized that nonmarried couples were now covered by the law, including homosexual couples.

All of these discursive shifts across the 1970s and 1980s meant that at the level of habitus, women's rights to live free from male partner violence was again “thinkable” largely due to the ways in which feminist voices authorized this new way of viewing the problem. In turn, women were now able to access more appropriate support regarding the violence they were experiencing that women's experiences of domestic life too shifted. No longer was male partner violence just a private marital affair that “good” wives had to endure and importantly, marriages now were relationships that women could more easily leave. Women were also more able to find avenues for support from a wider variety of fields: the police, lawyers, and other social service providers, like women's shelters and other violence prevention advocacy agencies.

A Gender-Symmetric Shift

While the field of second-wave feminism made significant advances in how male partner violence was discursively understood from the 1970s onwards, competing nonfeminist voices emerged that shifted how many in society made sense of the problem. One reason for this shift occurred within the shelter movement. From the 1980s onwards, the running of shelters was taken over by the field of social services. This predominantly nonfeminist field introduced a management culture into how shelters were organized and run. This shift meant that shelters took on corporate-like hierarchies, with women seen now as clients rather than participants within a feminist nonhierarchical space (Ahrens, 1980; Ferraro, 1983; Schechter, 1988). These factors, combined, led to the return of individualized, therapy-driven strategies for dealing with the problem, while also positioning women as dependent subjects, in need of treatment (Ahrens, 1980; Ferraro, 1983). Shelters also became locations for anti-feminist discourses to gain momentum. For example, during the 1980s, the rift between feminist- and nonfeminist-run shelters occurred as a narrative around “dangerous lesbianism” emerged; here, feminist-run shelters were seen as being led by lesbian radicals whose intentions were to destroy marriages by turning straight women gay (Ahrens, 1980; Schechter, 1988).

There has also been a growing focus on defining this form of violence from nonfeminist viewpoints across academic departments like psychology and sociology (Bograd, 1988). Most notably, it has been within the field of sociology and specifically the development of the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) by family sociologist Murray Straus (1979) that has caused marked changes in how society made sense of and talked about male partner violence (Dutton & Bodnarchuk, 2005; Gelles, 1985; Straus, 1979, 2005).

Still active in this research today, Straus and colleagues predominantly look at how families experience and manage conflict. The CTS is a quantitative, survey data-gathering method designed to empirically account for any conflict that research participants have experienced in their domestic environments. This method is still one of the most widely used tools in family violence research, due to its simplistic, quantitative features (Langhinrichsen-Rohling et al., 1995). From their findings, Straus and colleagues concluded that violence within families was gender-symmetric: that both men and women were equally violent in these spaces.

Feminists have widely critiqued this method of inquiry arguing that the scale itself provides little context about the violent occurrences being reported by its participants (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 1998; Dobash & Dobash, 1979; Yllo, 2005). As DeKeseredy and Schwartz (1998, pp. 3–4) argue:

The bulk of the research in this field has simply counted blows (who hit whom, and how often). The CTS2 speaks to one context issue (but only one) by asking about injury. A light slap may be different than one that jars loose several teeth. A push out of the way is different than a push down a flight of stairs. However, the survey still does not easily differentiate between a victim fighting back for her life, a survivor retaliating, and an instigator of violence without cause. All are considered violent.

Accordingly, this has silenced the reality that men use more severe forms of violence in romantic relationships than women do and that women experience higher degrees of fear from a romantic partner than men do (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 1998; Dobash & Dobash, 2004; Sev’er, 2002). The scale also does not differentiate from self-defense and other forms of physical violence, meaning that any act of self-defense (largely carried out by women: see Law Commission, 2001) is classed simply as physical violence. Overall, the CTS fails to account for gendered components of power and control, instead focussing more on argument–disagreement types of conflict (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 1998; Dobash & Dobash, 2004; Sev’er, 2002).

Regardless of these critiques, the gender-neutral discourse created by Straus and his colleagues has continued, up until this day, to perpetuate an understanding in society that partner violence is not gendered. Arguably, this understanding has been further cemented by the way that legislation in western world is worded: typically legislation and policy documents engage gender-neutral narratives by using terms like “domestic violence” or “family violence.” These labels can silence—or make unthinkable—the uniquely gendered experiences of male partner violence by clumping all types of familial violence—be it toward children, siblings, elders, or partners—together. Male partner violence, therefore, becomes lost in these catch-all gender-symmetric discourses. Today, in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the key legislation protecting women from violent partners is the 2019 Family Violence Act. Sadly, it falls, discursively, into the pitfalls of gender-symmetric understandings of violence in the home. It is ambiguous—it does not acknowledge that the violence women experience from a male partner is gendered, it does not differentiate adequately between this type of violence and say child abuse, it muddies the lexical terrain by using the word “family” which means that nonmarried and noncohabiting relationships are less recognized in the law. Arguably the term “domestic violence” is clearer than “family violence” when it comes to women's experiences of a violent male partner. Indeed, earlier terms that seem archaic now—“wife-beating” and “woman battering”—were more nuanced in gendering the problem.

While there is a range of gendered spaces and responses dedicated to helping women—for example, women's shelters and other advocacy organizations, streamlined legislation and models like the Power and Control Wheel that enable women to access more support than say in previous decades—gender neutral discourses do impact how the problem is understood and talked about in society. Due to these current discursive ambiguities and contradictions, women who experience male partner violence are again navigating a habitus that is likely not well-defined and potentially confusing. This contradictory discursive space also means that men are enabled to be more violent because women's agency is yet again hampered by dominant fields of action authorizing knowledge that preserves male privilege.