Journal of Social History

Moore, Sean T.
"Justifiable Provocation": Violence Against Women in Essex County, New York, 1799-1860
Journal of Social History - Volume 35, Number 4, Summer 2002, pp. 889-918

George Mason University Press

In the years between the ratification of the federal Constitution and the beginning of the Civil War, American society experienced fundamental changes in family relations, the criminal law, and public attitudes towards violence. Male heads of households found their authority challenged by evangelical religion, the emergent industrial order, reformers, and judicial intervention in family matters. By the mid-nineteenth century, the ideologies of separate spheres and the affectionate family displaced the traditional authoritarian, patriarchal family. In New York State, these familial changes were paralleled by revision of the criminal laws in 1829, the rapid development of reform campaigns against capital and corporal punishment, and the emergence of the women's rights movement. These progressive changes masked the reality of increasing violence against women in Essex County, New York as murder, rape, and assault rates rose dramatically. As wife murder, sexual assault, and unprosecuted cases of violence increased women continued to meet with limited success in prosecuting their assailants. These crime trends were rooted in both the new cultural sensibility, that idealized family harmony, female sexual purity, and individual reformation and in the emergence of an aggressive form of patriarchy based on control, access, and regulation of women's sexuality.