Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [143]
Wife-beating, then, could not be condoned, and was not condoned; but it was quite another thing to see it as a serious social problem. Laws forbidding violence against women expressed an idea and an ideal; in practice it is not clear if these laws accomplished very much. Some men did go to jail. A study in Pennsylvania in the 1880s identified 211 wife-beaters who were put away for an average of three months each behind bars.58 But the police were notoriously reluctant to make arrests in what they considered family squabbles. Some wives were reluctant to complain, or ashamed, or simply terrified of their brutal husbands. Sometimes it was outsiders—friends, relatives, church groups—who brought about enforcement; sometimes even vigilante groups, like the whitecaps.
Most of those arrested for this crime were immigrants and blacks. “Nice people” apparently did not wash their dirty linen in public. A man who beat his wife was supposed to be a brutal aberration. The popular image of the wife-beater was a lower-class drunk, an undisciplined beast with stubble on his chin. It was not often admitted that “nice” men beat wives, too; that wife-beating was epidemic and a sign of something rotten in the relationship between men and women in this culture. It was twentieth-century feminists who put forward the theory that male dominance itself was the problem, that is, “chronic battering of a person of inferior power” by the lord and master.59 Wife-beating was, by and large, a secret vice, which makes it hard to chart its ebbs and flows. Did the general mobility and weakening of authority lead to more wife-beating or less? Was it more, because of some sort of crisis within the family and some men’s loss of restraint? Was it less as women became, over time, relatively more empowered?
Women’s Crimes
A few crimes were specific to women, or dominated by women. Prostitution is the best example: the oldest profession, as the phrase goes. Other old professions gained legitimacy and prestige over time, but not this one. It was never accepted as a way to earn an honest dollar. It was always a crime to keep a “disorderly house.” We have already met Elizabeth Martin, “a very Low Notorious Wicked Woman . . . and Reputed a Common Whore” who consorted even with “Negro Slaves” and was ordered out of New York City.60 There was no change after independence: the business of prostitution remained outside the law in every state and every city.
For much of the century, some states lacked laws that explicitly criminalized prostitution. Too much should not be made of this. It was a crime to own and operate a brothel; and there were laws against “nightwalkers” and “vagrants,” and against “lewd and lascivious” behavior, all of which provided more than enough ammunition for sweeping prostitutes into the nets of the law—whenever the law cared to do so. An ordinance of Milledgeville, Georgia, ordered the arrest of “women of disreputable character, commonly known as ‘street walkers,’ who may be found standing or loitering about the streets or stores of this city at night, and who cannot prove that they are on unavoidable business.” One woman arrested in Milledgeville had the effrontery to appeal her conviction to the Georgia Supreme Court, which labeled her as “one of the most shameless of the class of depraved women.” The state had no statute against “nightwalking,” but, said the court, “such practices were inhibited by the common law,” and in any event,