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By Root 1929 0

ceremony, with the attorney general himself in attendance. By this time, the Institute for Women was a going concern.40 As prisons went, it was benign and reformatory; it was “cottage-style,” and occupied a campus of some five hundred acres. A skeptical judge sneered at the institute as a “fashionable boarding school.” But Dr. Harris insisted it was a place of discipline and efficiency.41 The women worked and learned, indoors and out; the buildings were named after social reformers like Jane Addams.42 Despite the name, there was nothing particularly industrial about the place. The women worked at home skills, office work, and farming; they raised and canned vegetables, cooked and made candy, typed and filed and learned business English.43

In many states, women’s prisons approached the reformatory ideal. Bedford Hills, in New York State, which opened in 1900, had no fences around it; it, too, was built on the “cottage plan.” Each cottage had a flower garden, kitchens, and twenty-eight rooms, which the inmates could decorate if they liked. The women could take classes; there were even singing lessons and gymnastics.44 In general, women’s prisons were more “benign” than men’s—but then, this was also true of most of the women in prison. Of the 505 women at Alderson in October 1935, more than half (264) had been convicted of narcotics charges; there were 80 on liquor charges, 58 for counterfeiting and forgery, 18 for violating the Motor Vehicle Theft Act—and only one for homicide.45 All these women had broken the law; almost none had broken bodies and bones.

The Woman Victim: Violence and Rape

Only recently have the cries of victims of domestic violence broken through the apathy and downright callousness of institutions of criminal justice. Historically, police were extremely reluctant to intervene in “domestic disturbances.” They often refused to make arrests; police manuals frequently told police to do nothing more than calm down the parties and mediate the dispute. A policy of this kind is really “tacit approval of the husband’s right to beat his wife.” Mediation, though it seems neutral, or benevolent, actually “serves the husband’s interest by decriminalizing his behavior.” Moreover, there can be grave risks in forcing a battered woman to go home and live with the man who battered her. A study of Kansas City homicides in 1971 found that 40 percent of them arose out of domestic violence; in about half of these cases, police had been called five or more times in the two years just before the murder.46 In a world where men do the beating, and women get beaten, cool neutrality may be an invitation to murder.

In extreme cases, of course, there was criminal liability; but only extreme cases came to the courts. It is clear that the law did not take wife-beating very seriously. A Maryland statute, for example, made it a misdemeanor for any person to “brutally assault and beat his wife.” The addition of the word “brutally” certainly implies that plain old assault was not really criminal.47 As Linda Gordon has pointed out, social agencies in the twentieth century have long been active in the fight against child abuse, but the battered woman was not on the agenda.48 Change came only with the most recent surge of feminist consciousness, and the recognition that the underlying problem is power. The basis of wife-beating, as Linda Gordon argues, “is male dominance—not superior physical strength or violent temperament.” She describes wife-beating as the “chronic battering of a person of inferior power who for that reason cannot effectively resist.”49 The subordination of women puts them at the mercy of men who are callous or brutal or vicious or deranged. There are all too many of these. The first shelters for battered women appeared in the cities in the 1970s. The old excuses—she must have been a nag; he only does it when he’s drunk—were no longer acceptable. Publicity about the problem encouraged the police to take the problem more seriously.

The dilemma of women trapped in abusive relationships comes out even more dramatically