Women's Rights In The 19th Century

Domestic Violence In the early history of the United States, somewhere close to the nineteenth century, along with the Temperance Movement came the recognition of Domestic Violence. In 1840, a Tennessee parent is prosecuted for the excessive punishment of a child in the Johnson vs. State court case (Staff). Ten years later, it is discovered that only nineteen states have laws allowing women to divorce abusive husbands. It will take twenty years before Fulgham vs. Alabama will rule that “a husband does not have the right to physically abuse his wife…” with the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling that “…beating or striking a wife violently with the open hand is not one of the rights conferred on a husband by the marriage, even if the wife be
Women in the United States did not acquire significant legal rights until the mid- to late-19th century and could not even vote until 1920. Before women achieved suffrage, married women were largely considered to be a form of marital property, and separated and divorced women were even more vulnerable to the whims of male authority figures (Lyons). The battering of women, when publicly noticed, was largely attributed to the vagaries of unusually violent men or the pathology of the women involved (Reaves). In his State of the Union Address, President Theodore Roosevelt suggested that wife-beaters be whipped, however, public whippings of wife-beaters never caught on
William Taft signs legislation establishing a Children’s Bureau to “investigate and report…upon all matters pertaining to the welfare of children and child life among all classes of our people.” just three years later (Staff). In 1935, the Social Security Act authorizes the first federal grants for child welfare services and in 1944, the Supreme Court confirms the state’s authority to intervene in family relationships to protect children with the Supreme Court case of Prince vs. Massachusetts (Reaves). 1964 in Pasadena, California, the Haven House is founded to provide for families of violent alcoholics. Haven House is the first shelter of its kind in the country at the time. In 1972, the first hotline for battered women will begin operating in St. Paul, Minnesota (Staff). "In ancient Roman times, a man was allowed by law to chastise, divorce, or kill his wife for adultery, public drunkenness, or attending public games—the very behavior that men were allowed, even expected to pursue, on a near­-daily basis! During the middle ages, a man's right to beat his wife was beyond question, yet a woman could be burned alive for so much as threatening her husband."