Yeah. No one said Hollywood was consistent. The Hays code didn’t ban depictions of divorce, per se, but did say “the sanctity of marriage and the home had to be upheld,” and divorce was considered an affront to the sanctity of marriage. It was OK if the wife remarried her husband, but there could be censorship issue if not, and the idea that she was better off divorced would go completely against it.
Christopher Miller’s book American Cornball has an entire entry on “Domestic Violence” . Bear in mind that this is a book about things people considered funny for the first half or so of the 20th century. Certainly this was intended as not serious – like The Honeymooners’ “To the Moon, Alice!”, but most of the examples he cites and images he shows are cringeworthy. They wouldn’t be there or under consideration if some people weren’t actually hitting their spouses. (And, for the record, his examples include wife-on-husband violence, too, although it’s far outnumbered by the reverse.)
As an additional data point, consider this rock song from 1962 . It’s not in Miller’s book, but in Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs
Just for the record, I don’t get all my information about domestic violence from humor books. but it seems like a place to get public attitudes toward it from.
I think corporal punishment of kids is another example. Today, beating one’s kids is frowned upon by most people. But most people aren’t gonna call CPS on friends and family who spank or threaten to spank their kids, not unless the kid is left bloodied or injured.
Don’t laugh at me but I just recently watched the episode of “Good Times” where Penny gets abused by her mother (she burns her with an iron). That was a Very Special episode dedicated to child abuse, and it was a poignant one. But it’s also kind of crazy when we consider that in most of the episodes, the Evans kids (at least JJ) got threatened with violence whenever they would get carried away. We’re supposed to understand that the Evans kids were subjected to “reasonable” violence while Penny was not. Her violence left scars and was perpetrated for no reason, while the punishments that the Evans kids got were both deserved and harmless. No way that would fly today, but it did in the late 1970s.
Thank you everyone for your answers, they are certainly informative.
I was just going to mention this. It’s a good analogy to what I was getting at. It used to be very common and largely socially acceptable, even encouraged, to discipline children with often severe corporal punishment - strapping, belting, caning, making them kneel on dry peas, paddling, boxing their ears, the list could go on. Today most educated people would consider such methods of discipline as abusive, but many people still at least occasionally spank their children; not a few do things like slapping their child’s face, and many people (but not myself!) balk at the thought of making such punishments illegal or of condemning parents who choose to use such methods (though 60 countries to date have explicitly or implicitly banned even light corporal punishment). In the same way, I wonder whether, even if severe battery of women was socially unacceptable decades ago, whether it was a relatively common occurrence for men to solve comparatively minor conflicts with their wives by slapping their face, grabbing their hand, spanking them, etc? (As I indicated in my original post, my benchmark is that NO physical assault, however light, is acceptable toward one’s wife (except in situations when it would be acceptable to do it to a complete stranger, e.g. in self-defense). The example given of Sean Connery condoning slapping a woman’s face as a last resort as recently as 1965 (and not abjuring it as recently as 1987) is a good one - it strongly hints at what I’m getting at. Ultimately, what I was aiming at was, do we have any notion of when hitting your wife AT ALL became about as uncommon an occurrence as it is today?
The OP asks about wife beating, but several posts have added some context by discussing related issues…drunk driving, childhood spankings and beatings. And I think that’s the right approach.
Violence in general used to be much more acceptable, in many areas of our society.
We could start with childhood: it used to be acceptable for any adult to spank a young child who misbehaved. Teachers, neighbors, a cashier who caught a kid shoplifting…
Then there was schoolyard fighting (not just minor bullying on the playground, but actual violence, with bruises, bloody noses and worse. There were fistfights among young children, and knife fights in high school.( Could West Side Story be written today, with its glamorous view of gang fights using weapons?) And then there was the classic barroom brawl as shown in movies, which the audiences saw as normal behavior.
And we can even add a very minor example from the woman’s side: face slapping. It used to be a normal meme in old black-and-white movies: the man acts too “fresh” and hints that the woman may be willing to offer her honor to him in the bedroom. So in the middle of the crowded dance floor, she hauls off and slaps his face , loudly.
There was a continuum of various levels of violence which were all acceptable two generations ago.
Somehow, we’ve reached a better place, but it’s been a slow transition.
Even today, it’s controversial, but there are plenty of people who make a distinction between acceptable (e.g. a swat on the behind) vs. unacceptable corporal punishment. And maybe also between threats of violence vs. actual violence.
And in general, I think that people were more accepting of violence in The Olden Days: it was much more common for children to wrestle or fight, and for grown men to engage in fisticuffs, and it was considered relatively harmless and unremarkable as long as no one got seriously injured. Or at least, that’s my impression.
ETA: Written before I really read chappachula’s post directly above, which makes somewhat the same point.
I’ve been watching a lot of movies from the 1930s and 1940s recently, and I’ve been impressed by how common and casual it was for some guy to “haul off and pop someone in the jaw” at the slightest excuse. Today you would be arrested for assault, but then it was treated as no big deal.
I recently watched The Great Ziegfeld, which includes a rendition by Fanny Brice of her hit My Man, which includes the lyrics:
He’s not much for looks
And no hero out of books
Is my man
Two or three girls has he
That he likes as well as me
But I love him!
I don’t know why I should
He isn’t good
He isn’t true
He beats me too
What can I do?
Billie Holiday kept the line about being beaten in her version of 1937. However, Barbra Streisand dropped that line for the version in Funny Girl in 1968.
My father was very physically, emotionally and sexually abusive towards us children and my mother; enough so that he would have gone to prison had it been now and not the 60s and 70s.
My mom told people about the abuse, and was ignored or told to forgive him. Once when father kicked my brother when he was small, my mom had to take him to the doctor for the injury. When the doctor asked what happened, my mom told him, and the doctor simply turned his back so he wouldn’t have to hear any more.
The Mormon church did nothing even though beating wives was not allowed, it also wasn’t well enforced. The leaders never recommended the only action which may have helped: divorce.
It was only when my sister reported him for sexual abuse that the church took minimal steps.
My mother’s family knew things were bad but no one asked questions about it. They didn’t want to know.
That level of abuse of kids and wives would not be tolerated now
I don’t know if I agree with this. Given my line of work, in an organization that serves domestic violence and sexual assault victims, I see plenty of excuses made for plenty of abusers and rapists. I think it’s less acceptable to joke about it than it used to be, and I think there’s some level of social accountability (in the broader sense) but there continue to be children abused and molested and women beaten all the time. And there continue to be victim blaming, denial, lack of family/church support and anything else one can imagine. In that sense, I don’t think hitting your wife has ceased to be “a thing.”
law enforcement have higher rates of sex crimes, spousal abuse and child abuse than the general public so that’s not surprising.
in the prohibition documentary they mentioned how prohibition was partly driven by women who didn’t have any legal protections from domestic violence and viewed banning alcohol as a way to reduce spousal abuse rates.
I also think it varies based on socioeconomic status when it became inappropriate.
Considering child abuse is still generally considered acceptable by a great number of people, I’m surprised there aren’t more vocal defenders of spousal abuse.
I think there are a lot of people who don’t instantly feel sympathy for a woman in a relationship characterized by violence. They are folks who hear about an incident and say stuff like, “Sure, she got punched/slapped/pushed. But maybe she did her own punching/slapping/pushing and she got what she deserved.”
I don’t think you’ll hear people espousing this view about an “abused woman”–because that connotes an innocent person who gets beaten up for no reason. But everyone knows a woman who runs her mouth a lot and can give just as good as she gets. The existence of that woman might make it easier for some segment of the population to see domestic violence as a “it is what it is” kind of thing rather than some that’s always a horrible crime.
Hitting your wife has not ceased to be “a thing.” It’s less socially acceptable than it was when I was a boy in the 1950s, but sadly it still happens quite a lot. My wife does volunteer work for a local shelter for domestic violence victims, and they’re always busy. Abusive relationships are very much “a thing.”
Way back then, *The Honeymooners’ * Ralph Kramden would draw back his fist and bellow, “One of these days, Alice, one of these days!” In the 1960s, The Flintstones was a shameless copy of that show, but Fred never threatened Wilma that way. Comedy changed, but real life violence continued.
OK, I less “less tolerated now,” and while I respect your direct experience, I also believe that things have changed even if it’s not all there yet.
There weren’t organizations like yours when I was growing up. My cousin worked for CPS, writing reports for judges recommending actions to be taken against abusers and said she would have recommended prison time and termination of parental rights for someone doing that level of abuse now.
It is sad that abuse still happens, but I believe society is moving in the right direction.
When my grandfather got married in the 1920s he was advised by his father-in-law to give his new wife ‘a slap’ once in a while, she being the sort of personality who supposedly needed/deserved it. He never did, and she was the dominant personality in that relationship (my brother remembers watching her chasing him around the room hitting him with the newspaper for some transgression)
I remember an episode of Andy Griffith where the Darlins are talking “he didnt hit his wife - very much”. so it was still joked about in the 60’s.
In Loretta Lynns autobiography “Coal Miner’s Daughter” she said in the beginning her husband hit her but she would hit him right back.
I take it that the idea you could leave your husband wirhout actually divorcing him wasn’t considered proper, either? I grew up understanding “separated” and divorced as separate things. And the prohibition on divorce I read about in the Bible seemed more about remarrying, not that it was treated as a big deal at my church unless you were a minister. Everyone else would just ask for forgiveness.
I do know that we were never told anything about the reason for any divorce, and I wasn’t privy to most rumors The only one I knew about involving abuse involved a family member—an uncle abused by his wife.
How would you eat? Put a roof over your head? If your family didn’t want you back, or felt you could work it out if you really wanted to, what could you do?
These days, I see a greater tendency to blame women for staying, instead of blaming them for being mouthy. It’s one of those complicated things . . . You want to really send the message to young people to leave abusive relationships ASAP, but that message creates this sort of unintended standard that staying makes you culpable and undeserving of help. And that, in turn, encourages victims to stay silent and help hide the abuse.
I suspect I’m quite a bit older than you and I’m sure that I come from a different ethnic background than you. What was common when I was growing up was known as an " Irish" or “Catholic” divorce. How is this different from separation, you might ask? And the difference is that in a separation, the couple generally lives apart . The people I knew did not- the husband and wife lived entirely separate lives in the same house/apartment. If they owned a house, one would live in the basement. If it was an apartment, they had separate bedrooms and did not share finances, meals or socialize together. I’ve known couples who lived like this for 20-30 years*. Thing is, while this arrangement may helped with all sorts of marital problems, it didn’t help with DV, because the abuser still had access to the victims.
- And yes, I knew multiple couples who did this. Five just off the top of my head who I knew well enough to know they did this. There’s no telling how many women I assumed were single mothers actually had a husband living in the basement.
I think it’s interesting to see how a movie made in 1972 treats wife-beating in the 1940s and 1950s. In the movie The Godfather, it slowly becomes clear to the Corleone family that his daughter Connie is getting hit by her husband, at least occasionally. At first, Vito Corleone is reluctant to do anything about it. He says that he never hit his wife, but then she never gave him any reason to hit her. Then Sonny Corleone notices how bad Connie looks after one beating. He goes to her husband and beats her up, threatening to kill him if he ever does it again. Later in the movie he finds that her husband has beat her up again. Sonny tries to go beat and maybe kill him, but it turns out that this was a trap to kill Sonny.
So it’s as though the feeling of the Corleone family in the 1940s and 1950s was that spousal abuse was a matter to be taken care of within the family, not by the law. If you find clear signs that a husband is badly beating his wife, other members of the family handle. You don’t go to the police. Perhaps this was a common attitude back then.