Intimate Partner Violence in New Orleans: Gender, Race, and Reform, 1840–1900 by Ashley Baggett (review)

During the nineteenth century, American courts repeatedly re-assessed husbands’ legal authority to employ violence to discipline their wives, often termed a man’s “privilege of chastisement.” In a study of court cases dealing with intimate partner violence in New Orleans from 1840 to 1900, Ashley Baggett charts the rise and fall of challenges to a man’s “right” to abuse his partner. Far from finding an era of hard-won progress in the battle to eliminate spousal violence, Baggett offers a more complicated portrait. She argues that shifting gender expectations gradually led criminal courts to reject such a privilege until the 1890s, when New Orleans judges, reflecting changes in race relations, largely re-endorsed earlier notions that a “veil of privacy” shielded domestic life from public scrutiny and hence implicitly restored men’s authority to discipline their wives as they saw fit.

Relying on the familiar periodization of American Southern history, Baggett divides the 1840–1900 era into four phases, each with a distinct perspective on the privilege of chastisement. At the start of this span, New Orleans courts deferred to a separate-sphere ideology, insisting that family life remained private, and therefore men possessed expansive authority to discipline their dependents, including slaves, children, and wives. During the antebellum years, powerful reform currents, particularly the temperance movement, chipped away at this privilege, and the courts more often interceded on behalf of abused wives but mainly when the violence occurred in public settings and when the abusive man was inebriated. The Civil War triggered a massive shift in the court’s treatment of intimate partner violence. Gender roles loosened during the early 1860s, the product of women’s war-time demonstrations of assertiveness and public competence. According to Baggett, “the fluid gender expectations after the Civil War created an opportunity for women to renegotiate relationships with men” (63). They increasingly insisted that their husbands had no authority to hit them, demanded the right to be free from domestic violence, sought legal redress for wife beating, and persuaded New Orleans courts to criminalize intimate partner violence. As a consequence, “manhood no longer included the privilege of chastisement” (94).

But this success in the court of public opinion and the criminal courts of New Orleans proved to be ephemeral. Baggett argues that legal institutions largely abandoned abused wives during the final decade of the century. Rather, as Southern whites embraced white supremacy and Jim Crow, intimate partner violence became “racialized.” White New Orleanians, including judges, increasingly used domestic violence as a marker of the racial hierarchy. Wife beaters were savage, barbaric, and therefore African American. Superior, civilized white men, by contrast, did not engage in such brutality. Thus, legal authorities during the 1890s ignored the violence of white husbands but pursued cases against African American men in order to affirm white supremacy. Such a pivot also provided a convenient pretext for disfranchising African American men and a ready justification for lynching such savage, violent men. In the process, the use of the courts to protect African American women from intimate partner violence became a sham, and abused white wives lost legal protection altogether. The court simply overlooked white intimate partner violence, restoring the veil of privacy and, as a result, re-establishing white husbands’ rights to chastisement.

Baggett draws her evidence largely from intimate partner violence court cases. She unearthed 421 trial records for the 1840–1900 period—28 from the 1840–65 era, 225 from the 1880s, and 196 from the 1890s. Her analysis uses both the narratives of these criminal cases and the judges’ formal opinions. Baggett skillfully identifies evocative quotations, providing a rich context for her analysis.

Her argument is generally persuasive, though her evidence is often more suggestive than definitive. Baggett frames her analysis with bold assertions that sometimes outdistance her sources and supporting documentation. For example, she states that “during the 1870s and 1880s, New Orleans courts intervened...