Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660-1857 (review)

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.

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 nineteenth-century Mary Veitch are introduced as leitmotifs at the very beginning of the work. There are many interesting and important aper\cid{cus} 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.

So far, so good. But unfortunately, none of these themes is properly developed. Rachel and Mary are quickly forgotten. Violence is apparently confused with abuse. The chapter on women's resistance isn't very convincing, especially when Foyster focuses on the practice of diary-keeping as a form of resistance[p. 93]. I appreciated the suggestion that it was important to look at children's own views of parental violence, but then Foyster's evidence runs perilously thin.

The greatest weakness of Marital Violence, however, is the incoherence of its argument. Even after reading and rereading carefully, I am not sure whether or not the author thinks there was change over time. Her Introduction and the publisher's "blurb" led me to expect a transition during the two hundred years under study. But that is never persuasively argued or demonstrated. Though Foyster asserts that domestic violence becomes associated with the working class, her treatment of the issue of class is at best a superficial one. Nor is family life contextualized within a discussion of larger forces, such as either urbanization or industrialization.

The final chapter, "The origins of professional responses" is where Foyster needs to make her case. In her Preface she had asserted that there is little evidence of long-term privatization of family life during this period, family relationships remaining a matter of public concern. "It was when the issue of domestic violence started to be regarded as so problematic that only 'professionals' could deal with it satisfactorily, a point which began to be reached by the mid-nineteenth century, that the shift away from community responsibility for handling domestic violence began." [xi] This is an extremely interesting observation, one that leads the reader to expect to learn how and why domestic violence came to be seen as increasingly problematic. That never happens. Nor do we learn anything about the process of professionalization, or of how and why these family "problems" were turned over to the new Victorian professional expert. Indeed, Foyster's opportunity is considerably weakened by beginning her discussion with the example of clergymen—hardly the new sort of Victorian professional one would expect. Her cursory survey of the new medical professions is hardly more helpful. "Professionalisation has been studied...