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REVIEWS
SECTION 5
GENDER AND FAMILY
| Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660–1857. By Elizabeth Foyster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiii plus 282 pp. $ 70.00 Hardback; $ 27.99 Paperback).
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| Marital Violence is an interesting treatment of an important subject by an accomplished scholar. The beginnings—the Introduction and first chapter, "Rethinking the Histories of Violence"—are indeed promising. But Elizabeth Foyster loses her way, and this volume turns out to be disappointing. Her subject is marital violence and its place in English family life in what the author frequently describes as the "Restoration to Victorian society." [p. 194] One of the major problems most historians will have is whether or not Foyster indeed sees this as a single coherent period. |
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The book's early promise comes from the depth of Foyster's archival base and an apparent novelty of conceptualization. She promises to show how violence was defined, how women, as well as men, initiated that violence, how women resisted male violence, how such violence affected not only the marital duo, but their kith, kin, and community as well, and how all this changes over time. The stories of the seventeenth-century Rachael Norcott and the nineteenthcentury Mary Veitch are introduced as leitmotifs at the very beginning of the work. There are many interesting and important aperçus dotted throughout the book: That marital violence took place within continuing relationships; That the history of childhood has in fact been told as the history of parenting; That some measure of domestic violence was considered acceptable in English society, consistent with community standards of patriarchal authority. At the beginning of the work, Foyster introduces the idea of "cruel" violence, that which goes beyond those community standards. And she asserts that it was professionalization, rather than privatization, which reduced the community's responsibility for "policing" those marriages where violence went beyond the norm. |
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