Book Review

Domestic violence takes multiple forms in the fourteen wide-ranging studies presented in Over the Threshold. These essays render visible the coercion that structured many of the daily interactions between lovers, spouses, parents and children, and masters, servants, and slaves. Moving beyond strictly marital relations to explore violence in the household at large, this important collection shows how domestic inequality shaped relations of class, race, and gender over three centuries.

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G. S. Rowe and Jack D. Marietta begin with a statistical analysis of domestic violence in Pennsylvania from 1682 to 1801. They assert that historians have been beguiled by the rhetoric of a "peaceable kingdom" and have underestimated the prevalence of intimate violence in Pennsylvania and in early America generally. The next four chapters discuss class-based definitions of masculinity and male honor as the context for attitudes toward violence. Jacquelyn C. Miller sees an aversion toward violence as part of the middle-class pursuit of self-control in eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Women and men strove for rational self-constraint, in part because they feared that uncontrolled anger helped spread diseases such as yellow fever. Emphasizing class difference over gender inequality, Miller claims that "reason was a core element of a transgendered middle-class identity." Ed Hatton investigates the furor over a murder in New Jersey in 1833 to show that fears of unbridled male passion led middle-class Americans to discern romantic love from dangerously volatile lust. Popular discourse emphasized the suppression of men's "natural" anger and sexual aggression as a prerequisite for honorable manhood. Randolph A. Roth explores the increase in spousal murder in New Hampshire and Vermont and argues that among the "drinking poor," men's "sense of failure" can help account for the twenty-seven wives (compared to four husbands) murdered between 1830 and 1865. Like Roth, Edward E. Baptist believes that men's fears of failure led them to misogynist violence. Baptist analyzes the ballad of "Omie Wise," a popular song based on the murder of pregnant Naomi Wise by her lover in North Carolina in 1807. Economic pressures and white men's anxieties about achieving "mastery" resulted, Baptist says, in a loathing of women and their fertility that can explain the song's ambivalence about the self-restraint required of honorable men.

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