Bleak Houses. Lisa Surridge
when he thought of the dastardly and cowardly assaults which were being constantly perpetrated upon defenceless women by brutes who called themselves men” (124 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 1414). Fitzroy repeatedly emphasized the inadequacy of the justice system as he read out cases from 1852 and 1853. (Interestingly, although the proposed bill was to cover women and children, it was the wife beater, that “brute in the form of a man” [124 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 1414] who drew Fitzroy’s attention, as not one of these cases involved abused children.) His speech contrasted manliness, courage, and humanity with the brutal, cowardly, and inhuman qualities of the wife beater. Moreover, the speech used horror at marital violence as a marker of true Englishness, and crimes against women as a betrayal of nationhood. Fitzroy’s point was that a true Englishman could neither beat his wife, nor bear to read in the newspapers about others doing so. Genuine British manliness, he suggested, was incompatible with committing or countenancing marital violence.
In the late 1840s and early 1850s, a period of growing journalistic and political activity on the subject of domestic assault, Victorians who sought to solve the problem of wife assault approached the issue from two distinct ideological positions. The first, exemplified by Fitzroy, represented men as women’s natural protectors. Advocates of this position embraced a manly ideal combining authority with self-control, and sought greater punishments for men who violated standards of masculinity by using violence against the “weaker sex” (124 Parl. Deb 3s., col. 1414). One can distinguish from this the emergent feminist position that held that wife beating was a symptom of women’s legal nonexistence. This view was put forward by John Stuart Mill, Helen Taylor, and Barbara Leigh Smith, all of whom tried to change laws governing marital coverture and married women’s property. But these positions were by no means mutually exclusive. Mill, for example, one of the most passionate advocates for corporal punishment, at times characterized women as weak and in need of protection. In “Protection of Women” (Sunday Times, 24 August 1851), he described assault victims as “helpless, virtuous, unoffending creatures,” and their assailants as “bipedal monsters” and “brute beasts” (PW, 2b). It is characteristic of the complexity of gender relations and feminism in the 1850s that Caroline Norton (one of the most forceful advocates for feminist legal reform) both deplored the legal nonexistence of married women and asserted her inferiority to men: “The natural position of woman is inferiority to man,” she wrote. “Amen! .… I am Mr Norton’s inferior; I am the clouded moon of that sun.… Put me under some law of protection” (LQ, 98–99). In this moment of ideological contest, debate on the 1853 “Good Wives’ Rod” very largely represented the former position: most MPs perceived wife and child assault as a symptom of men’s failure to act as guardians or protectors of the weak. MPs thus defended male superiority while seeking to ensure the correct use of male power. Parliament, then, became one of many forums in which the ideal of manly self-control was defined and enforced.
The 1853 bill was relatively uncontentious, indicating the widespread perception that something needed to be done about wife assault, a problem that feminists and nonfeminists alike perceived as being on the increase (Doggett, 115).2 The Times supported the measure (12 March 1853, 6d), and Punch wrote, “Mr. Fitzroy deserves eternal honour for having taken up the cause of the ill-used Women” (19 March 1853, 119). The only substantial issues of debate were whether flogging should be added as a punishment for assaults against women and children, and whether a magistrate should have the summary power to inflict as substantial a penalty as a £20 fine or a six-month prison sentence. The flogging amendment was proposed by Mr. Phinn, who argued that corporal punishment was appropriate “where men were already reduced below the level of the brute” (124 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 1419). It was supported by the Times (12 March 1853), which argued that “there can be no question of ‘degrading’ a man who inflicts a course of violent and continued brutality upon a woman or a child. The truth is, the brute is so degraded already that, short of miracles, his fears constitute the only channel by which his actions can be touched” (6d). Punch also supported flogging “in a clear case of brutality towards a woman”—the article does not mention children—arguing that “nothing can be too degrading for one who degrades himself in the manner alluded to” (19 March 1853, 119). Finally, Mill threw his weight behind the measure, arguing in an anonymous and privately printed pamphlet on Fitzroy’s bill, “Overwhelming as are the objections to corporal punishment except in cases of personal outrage, it is peculiarly fitted for such cases” (CW, 21:105). (Unlike Punch, Mill mentions assaults on both women and children; notably, he also was able to imagine assaults on children by women, a possibility that others seem to have overlooked.) Ultimately, however, the amendment failed by a two-to-one margin, as most MPs agreed with Fitzroy that flogging was “inconsistent with the feeling of the age” (125 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 677).3 What public and parliamentary discussion there was on Fitzroy’s bill, however, provides important evidence that domestic assault was widely perceived as a violation of manliness, an act of men “reduced below the level of the brute” (124 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 1419), and a betrayal of British values, as Punch communicated with its Orientalized image of a “Tyrant” man wielding force over his wife (16 April 1853, 158; fig. 2.1). Implicit too, was the assumption that family violence characterized lower-class men who could not control their passions as middle-class mores increasingly demanded. Hammerton observes, “Middle-class manliness, denoting protectiveness and benevolence to women, as well as undisputed power, was … compromised by the unruly men of the lower classes” (Hammerton, Cruelty, 61). Describing abusive men as brutes, sympathetic MPs represented beaten wives as “defenceless,” “soft,” and “kindly” (124 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 1414, 1417), loyal to their abusers and unwilling to testify against them. Earl Granville, speaking in the House of Lords, deplored the “cases of great cruelty, wholly wanton and unprovoked, committed by brutal husbands upon their defenceless wives and children” (127 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 551). Implicit in the descriptions of brutal men and defenseless wives and children was the middle-class expectation that the husband should protect—not abuse—his family. This argument applied with particular force to women, assumed to deserve protection from all men. As Viscount Palmerston argued in the House of Commons, “He did not at all admit that a man was more entitled to commit these injuries upon his own wife, than upon another man’s wife. On the contrary, he thought that it was a greater offence. His own wife was more entitled to expect protection, and another man’s wife had her own husband to guard her from injury” (125 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 680). Debates on the 1853 bill thus illustrate how legislative attempts to control family violence were fueled by middle-class ideals of masculine behavior. Focusing on the right role of men much more than on the rights of women, MPs sought to correct male behavior while preserving middle-class gender roles. Important as the 1853 act was to women suffering assault, it was based on an idea of wife battery as a violation of cherished gender norms, an offence of the brutal against the weak. The act was premised on the physical and moral supremacy of men in marriage. It sought not to limit that power but to correct its application.
Figure 2.1. Illustration for “Panel for the Protection of Ladies,” Punch 24 (1853): 158.
The Closed Home
While MPs in 1853 harnessed shifting ideals of manliness to counter the problem of marital violence, they worked within the doctrine of coverture, which authorized very extensive powers to the husband. At midcentury, the doctrine of coverture had been reinforced by the 1840 Cochrane decision, which enforced the “general right of the husband to the control and custody of his wife” (Times, 12 June 1840, 7e).4 The facts of the Cochrane case were as follows: Cecelia Maria and Alexander Cochrane married in 1833. In 1836, Cecelia Cochrane left her husband, taking their young son, and went to live with her mother in Ireland and France. Alexander Cochrane successfully applied for a writ for restitution of conjugal rights. The writ was not effective while Cecelia was in Ireland, but in May 1840 she was “induced by a strategem” (Times, 12 June 1840, 7d) to come to England and to go to her husband’s lodgings. Alexander “immediately placed her in custody”