Domestic Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy Against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present

Family violence, once considered a private trouble, has become a matter of intense public concern. Many people think the problems of child abuse and wife-beating were "discovered" in the last two decades. This book, the first history of family violence in the United States, proves otherwise. Based on enormous research into court records, newspaper accounts, and autobiographies, the book creates a broad portrait of America's attitudes toward family violence over time, considering not only how the problem has been defined but also the institutional and legal remedies reformers have devised to respond to it. The author investigates the reasons for the ebb and flow of societal attention to the problem from the Puritans of New England, who devised a criminal code to punish wife-beating, to Victorian efforts to prevent cruelty to children, to the battered woman's movement of our time. Pleck contends that an unusual social and political atmosphere, rather than a change in the nature or incidence of family violence, stimulated concern. Furthermore, Pleck shows that the goal of polieis against family violence has been, for much of American history, to shore up the family and reconcile victim and victimizer within the home. Placing the safety of victims ahead of the goal of preserving the family leads inevitably to increased efforts to remove victims from their homes, Pleck maintains. Yet such efforts are controversial, and throughout history the most successful reformers have carefully sidestepped this issue, the book shows.