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

Family violence, once considered a private problem, has become a matter of intense public concern. Many people believe that social concern about child abuse and wife beating began in the 1960s. Elizabeth Pleck's study, the first history of family violence in the United States, proves otherwise. Based on in-depth research using court records, newspaper accounts, and autobiographies, Domestic Tyranny presents a broad portrait of America's attitudes towards family violence over time, considering not only the varying definitions of the problem but also the institutional and legal remedies reformers have created to respond it.
Pleck 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.