| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 58

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Martin J. Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004)

FEMINISTS TODAY might logically assume that the legal penalties and social stigma attached to rape, wife-beating, and other forms of male violence against women are a product of feminist actions within the last 40 years. Martin Wiener argues convincingly in Men of Blood that the roots of intolerance for male violence against women lie in the Victorian redefinition of masculinity.

Building on the connections between culture and crime which he charted broadly for the 19th century ten years ago in Reconstructing the Criminal, Wiener aims this time to look at gender in 19th-century criminal justice history. While there have been histories of women as murderers and of female criminality, relatively few historians have used masculinity as a lens to understand changing perceptions of the male criminal. This alone sets this work apart. Wiener's goal is to "understand the meaning and treatment of serious violence, especially against women, in Victorian England." (xii) He argues that masculine criminality was undergoing a significant reconstruction in this era, manifested principally in a diminished tolerance of men's violence against women.

It is a meticulous study based on a careful reading of several thousand rape and homicide cases in the assizes, the highest courts of original jurisdiction, spanning nearly a century and the entire nation. Wiener considers every case of spouse murder that went to trial and a large sample of spouse manslaughter and other homicide and rape cases. The very scope of his qualitative readings is impressively ambitious.

The overall trends charted by Wiener are intriguing. He finds that in the Victorian period male-on-male killing declined markedly. Dueling was outlawed, prizefighting became a more regulated and less bloody sport; even fist fights became less respectable. In the early 19th century pub and street fighting were seen as deeply rooted in working-class culture and a fist fight that resulted in death might be treated indulgently by the law if it was deemed a "fair fight." But increasingly male-on-male violence was stigmatized and curtailed by the law. Wiener sees this growing intolerance for male violence as being partly a reflection of the heightened urgency of the "civilizing" mission, as numbers of poor Irish came to England during the Famine, as the transportation of convicts ceased, and as the working class gained political power in towns after the Reform Act of 1867. Nonetheless, it remained true that as long as weapons were not used, the curtailment of male-on-male violence throughout the Victorian period could be selective.

In contrast, Weiner sees a much more dramatic change in how the courts and society regarded male violence against women. When their victims were women, men were convicted and punished with ever more severity. Wiener looks at two main categories of crime: rape and murder. Chapter Three on "Sexual Violence" is perhaps most controversial. Here Wiener argues not only that sexual assault was taken more seriously in the 19th century, but that the prosecution and conviction rate rose markedly. There were two main developments. First, the idea of "without her consent" gained prominence. Courts were more sympathetic to women in situations where it was difficult or impossible for a woman to resist an attack. A woman who lost consciousness through intoxication, for example, could not give her consent. Extreme youth might exclude resistance, as would an employer- employee or teacher-student relationship. Second, there was a new emphasis on character. Feminist historians have claimed that the emphasis on character put the victims on trial. Wiener argues that it often had the opposite effect; if a woman had a reasonable claim to chastity, she could use her good character against a man, even across class boundaries. The result was that there were more prosecutions for sexual assault resulting in convictions than ever before.

If sexual assault was regarded more harshly, so was murder, but only when the perpetrator was a man. Whereas women who committed infanticide or who murdered either lovers or husbands were increasingly viewed sympathetically as victims (of illicit intercourse, abuse, or abandonment), men who killed women were prosecuted and convicted with greater frequency and were allowed fewer and fewer excuses. Traditionally, a man who killed his wife could claim to have been provoked by verbal abuse, habitual drunkenness, or sexual infidelity. If he did not use a weapon and if he was drunk when he killed her, that all worked in his favour. But even these traditional excuses in the Victorian period were unlikely to result in an acquittal. A man now had to show not only that he had a "bad wife," but that he himself was of good character and that the killing of his wife involved one angry blow, rather than a sustained beating. If his past or the death itself demonstrated brutality, the courts would not demonstrate leniency for a man who killed his wife. In the Victorian period the only likely way to escape conviction for wife killing was to plead insanity. In spouse murder, jury verdicts of insanity increased from 12 in the 1880s to 23 in the 1890s. The insanity defence was hardly an attractive one though; while a man escaped execution, he was doomed to life in an asylum. And there were no guarantees it would work. The overall trend was towards an increasingly negative view of men who killed their wives.

Wiener's explanation for this growing intolerance for men who rape or kill women is that ideals of masculinity changed the society's broad view of male violence. Instead of bravery, self-assertion, and physical prowess, Victorian society valued honour, reasonableness, and self-restraint. The domestic ideal meant that there was a sharpened image of women as moral, spiritual, and religious, but also as weak and fragile. Men were seen as stronger, energetic, and rational. The ideal meant that there were not only changing expectations for women, but for men. Men should protect women, employ discipline to check their aggressive impulses, and use reason rather than brawn to settle their disputes. To do otherwise was to reveal oneself as brutish, without reason, and uncivilized.

All of this is an appealing argument, but it is difficult to prove. Wiener draws mostly on court cases for his evidence with occasional references to press reports and popular fiction. His argument is based more on informed conjecture to account for the trend within his cases, than on showing evidence of nonviolence within the popular culture. It raises questions beyond the boundaries of this book. For example, if Wiener had included assault cases, cases where men beat their wives but did not kill them, would his conclusions be as convincing? And what about cases that were never prosecuted? Was there a tolerance for wife-beating in Victorian England that never showed up in court?

This is a fascinating and provocative book based on a prodigious amount of research. It is highly recommended for those interested in legal and gender history and for anyone curious about the roots of our own social attitudes towards violence.


Lori Loeb University of Toronto

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