Hatton, Ed. " 'He Murdered Her Because He Loved Her': Passion, Masculinity, and Intimate Homicide in Antebellum America" in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Intimate Violence in Early America. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.
Roth, Randolph A. "Spousal Murder in Northern New England, 1776-1865" in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Intimate Violence in Early America. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.
Vigarello, Georges. A History of Rape: Sexual Violence in France from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2001. Tr. by Jean Birrell from the French.
Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Over the past thirty or so years, as the historiographies of women’s history and gender history have grown exponentially, nearly every aspect of the history of women and of gender roles has been examined. However, while we now know a lot about female prostitutes and other criminals, women who worked outside the home, and women who dwelled in the domestic sphere roles given them by society, there has been a strange lacuna in the scholarship regarding women as victims, either of rape or other crimes. This is, perhaps, for several disparate reasons. The most important has been the paucity of sources. Until very recently, rape has not been considered a serious crime, and few victims have come forward. Furthermore, only within the last generation in Western societies such as the United States and Europe has spousal rape become considered to be a crime. This paucity does not exist as much when it comes to spousal murder and other crimes of violence against women, and thus more scholars have focused on the history of this crime rather than that of rape. Secondly, many feminist scholars have perhaps mainly directed their attention toward other subjects which have had a far greater ability to show female empowerment in the past. To write about women as victims, without any (or many) legal recourses, admittedly is a dreary project.
Nevertheless, there have been a few scholars who have examined the history of violence against women, which are surveyed in this paper. Georges Vigarello, in his A History of Rape, Sexual Violence in France from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century examines the changing meanings of rape and its changing and significance throughout four centuries of French culture and law. Examining rape from an Annales School, longue durée framework (a framework which stresses the long-term developments of history), Vigarello argues that rape’s changing meanings and its changing significance as a crime directly correlate to broader shifts in French cultural and legal sensibilities toward the rights of the individual, the child, and of women. Anna Clark in her Men’s Violence, Women’s Silence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770-1845 and Judith Walkowitz in her City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London examine the history of rape in England from much narrower frameworks. Anna Clark examines rape during just the late Georgian through early Victorian period in England, arguing that it operated as one of the chief means by which the emerging separate spheres system was regulated. Walkowitz’s study, centering on W.T. Stead’s investigations into child prostitution and the craze surrounding Jack the Ripper, examines how gender roles were questioned, reformulated, and ultimately regulated again. Lastly, this paper considers two essays written about spousal murder in mid-nineteenth century America by Ed Hatton and Randolph A. Roth. Ed Hatton examines a 1833 New Jersey court case surrounding the murder of Mary Hamilton by Joel Clough to show how ideas about proper manly behavior and passion were very much in flux in antebellum American society. Finally, Randolph A. Roth examines spousal murder in New Hampshire and Vermont from the much more broader time span of the American Revolution to the Civil War to locate the causes for the dramatic rise of spousal murder rates in the middle of the nineteenth century compared with earlier periods.
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