Book Review

David Peterson del Mar makes an important contribution to understanding the history of domestic violence in this study, which is based upon the unique records kept by the courts of Oregon since its earliest days. Oregon not only had liberal divorce laws, but its courts maintained detailed written records of divorce cases, including transcripts of the testimony of witnesses. These records provide only a small sample of the domestic violence that must have occurred, because they are limited to cases in which married persons were the victims and actually sought and obtained a divorce, despite the shame and economic difficulty involved. Nonetheless, review of these records allows Peterson del Mar to describe the nature of domestic violence in a particular context and to do so in the voices of its victims and perpetrators.	1
The author's primary thesis is that the amount and severity of "wife beating" has varied over time in response to certain long-term cultural transformations that are themselves related to major economic, social, and political changes. Oregon was settled in the mid-1800s primarily by former residents of Missouri and the southern states, who brought with them very traditional notions of marriage and of male authority within it. In this period, divorce records show that the use of physical force on wives was common, resulting, in the opinion of the author, from both husbands' view of wives as subordinate and the frequent use of violence to settle disputes on the frontier. By contrast, the spread of bourgeois culture, with its emphasis on discipline, character, and self-control, accompanied by an increase in the moral influence of women, led to a decline of violence by the 1890s. Popular novels began to portray beating one's wife as a savage custom, and testimony in divorce courts attributed its occurrence to a lack of self-control. Indeed, homicide and assault rates in general decreased, along with the incidence of domestic violence. At the same time, widespread use of sexually pejorative epithets and humor hinted at a misogyny beneath the surface of men's more restrained and chivalrous conduct.	2
The official disapproval of wife beating brought about passage of the Whipping Post Law, a form of corporal punishment for offenders, which was in effect in Portland from 1905 to 1911. While this law betokened the community's condemnation of violent behavior within the family, it was seldom used, however, and then only against working-class, foreign-born, or marginal men. Given the lack of evidence of any correlation between domestic violence and economic class or foreign birth, Peterson del Mar concludes that the law was used basically to scapegoat a few for this conduct, punishing them without admitting complicity on the part of males who were native-born or middle-class.	3
Since World War I, a cultural transformation of major proportions has occurred, involving a shift from Victorian hard work, discipline, and self-restraint to a society increasingly based upon consumption and embracing the ideal of individual self-fulfillment. Peterson del Mar blames this transformation for the increase in both the frequency and severity of domestic violence from the 1920s to the present day. Women became more independent; the divorce rate increased; and so did male ambivalence toward women, illustrated both in popular Western novels of the 1920s and 1930s and the startling increase in violent pornography since the late 1960s. Unrestrained by Victorian ideals of self-control and deference to women and threatened by their growing independence, men struck out at their wives more often and with intensified brutality. At the same time, the violence became less predictable because it was less connected to particular conduct.	4
Peterson del Mar tells a parallel story of women's response to this violence and society's efforts to intervene. Preindustrial family life provided many advantages in this respect, because women were protected by their families of origin and the typical household consisted of more than the nuclear family. With households shrinking to the romantic couple and their children and a sense of communal responsibility declining, the police and legal system gradually became the route of community intervention. Yet while women grew increasingly independent, they remained vulnerable because of their primary relationship to the couple's children and lack of a secure relationship to the labor market. Nonetheless, wives' capacity to resist violence within the home did increase, especially in the last few decades with the establishment of shelters and networks of assistance for battered women.	5
Where does this leave us at the end of the twentieth century? On the one hand, the incidence and intensity of domestic violence is high; and evidence of men's ambivalence toward women, if not outright misogyny, surrounds us. On the other hand, domestic violence has now been recognized as a serious social problem, and measures to protect women from it have been taken. While Peterson del Mar lauds these improvements and urges their continuation, the force of his central thesis—that domestic violence is causally related to long-term cultural transformations—leads him to conclude that this violence will never be contained without a substantial reorientation of the modern cultural ethos, away from personal freedom and self-fulfillment toward (or back to) notions of responsibility, accountability, and community. Nonetheless, the promotion of economic and social justice for women—for equality in employment, for adequate and enforceable child support, and for criminal and family courts that take domestic violence very seriously—remains a goal. Yet women's very independence and equality apparently play a substantial causative role in the ambivalence modern men feel toward their wives.	6
Emphasizing the interconnections between mainstream culture and domestic violence directs our attention away from theories of individual psychopathology as causing domestic violence and thus from the impossible goal of intensive psychological intervention with each of a very large number of deviant individuals. Yet if the problem of domestic violence can only be solved through a transformation of mainstream culture, what hope does this offer? How does a society change its ethos? As Peterson del Mar demonstrates, in the past these changes have emerged out of major economic and social transformations—industrialization, the separation of work from home, urbanization, and the like. In the absence of similar transformative change, the violence faced by many women will continue to exist; all the larger community can do is to offer palliative measures and attempt to protect individual women.	7
Cynthia Grant Bowman Northwestern University School of Law

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