Violence Against Women in Europe and America, Part III
woman. Hatton examines the various discourses of the murder trial to argue that antebellum America had often confusing and contradictory attitudes toward respectable masculinity. By the early nineteenth century, men were increasingly expected to control emotions of passion or anger. Nevertheless, as Hatton points out, there was no consensus on how “men should handle their ‘natural’ aggression.” (p. 115) This lack of consensus led to a wide debate in the murder trial over Clough’s “guilt.” Though Clough was eventually pronounced guilty and sentenced to die, there were many who felt that he was, at least in part, “justified” in his actions by Mary Hamilton’s refusal of his two requests for marriage.
Randolph A. Roth in his “Spousal Murder in Northern New England, 1776-1865,” examines spousal murder patterns in New Hampshire and Vermont from the late nineteenth century through the American Civil War. During the period from 1776 to 1827, the rate of marital homicide in Vermont and New Hampshire was 0.03 per 10,000, a rate which increased by almost 1,200% by the 1840s to 0.39 per 10,000 and by over 1,400% by 1865 to 0.47 per 10,000. (Roth, p. 67) Oddly enough, these increased murders occurred in a society which had fewer drinkers, which had fewer weapons, and which was less religious than that of the colonial era. (p. 78) So the increased murder can not be directly explained by these factors. Rather, Roth offers a socio-cultural explanation for the heightened marital violence. Poor men who heavily drank, he argues, began by the 1830s to be more socially isolated from other class than before. This may have led to a heightened sense of failure among these men, that they had failed in the eyes of society, those of their spouses, and in their own. (p. 85) These factors led to a tendency for violence which was increased by a threat of separation or divorce by the suffering spouse. (p. 88)
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