Close Reading response: Wife-torture in England

While reading France Power Cobbe’s Wife-Torture in England, one can’t help see how the implications of women and their standings within society essentially doomed them to become victims of domestic violence. Cobbe goes into detail profiling the victims of these offences, the husbands who abuse them and the circumstances keeping them in homes of abuse.

The reasoning Cobbe offers for “wife torture” is what modern-day activists would call victim blaming — the idea that the woman’s behavior led her to be beaten and abused. We see this through what Cobbe classifies as the three types of abuse that men do: men vs. men, men vs. anonymous women and men vs. their wives. The first two types are punishable by law, because they are acts of violence. But Cobbe explains how the last — men vs. their wives — was (at that time) more acceptable than the other violent acts because of victim blaming.

Cobbe explains how because women are classified as property, they are dehumanized in their husbands eyes (62). Furthermore, women are rarely financially independent. So when they ask for financial assistance from their husbands to buy food or provide for their children, a wife is seen as “nagging,” which is cause for abuse to occur.

Women were also discouraged to report such abuse for multiple reasons. One big one is that prior to 1853, there were virtually no laws protecting women from violence. Also, following that year, if a woman was to say her husband beat her, she had to testify against him in court with a “substantial” amount of evidence. Her husband would only be locked up for about 6 months. This gives little incentive for any woman to turn her husband in, for fear that he will return to the home and the abuse will continue and increase in severity (80).

What we see here is a lot of what we see in today’s society. Although there are many more laws to protect women now, we see victim-blaming occurring very frequently (especially in the case with sexual violence against women) and we see women refusing to leave their homes for fear their husbands/significant others will return and the abuse will continue.

What I find very interesting about this text, however, is the fact that the language Cobbe uses in her essay show a sort of victim-blaming going on as well. We see this a lot in the present, too, with many victim blaming practices. In certain parts of her essay, Cobbe discusses the intelligence and financial means of the victims, claiming that those factors directly enable women to become abused. Specifically “poor, stupid, ignorant women as most of them are” are more prone to drinking. This can be a reason for abuse to occur.

Similarly, with modern-day rape victims, many blame the amount of alcohol they consume or the clothing that they wear as a factor in their rapes. Cobbe shows a typical critique of many. Though they might not think the abuse occurring is good, they use qualifiers as to who was abused and how that occurs — meaning some of us are more prone to it, so for some of us, it is more “acceptable” than other cases.

By classifying women into separate classes, it shows a tier of acceptability and expectancy for abuse to occur. Some women are more prone to it, so it’s easier to justify.