Domestic Violence In Colonial America

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During the colonial period leading to about the middle of the nineteenth century little progress was made in America to control domestic violence against women. During this period the United States has a new nation was experiencing many changes. The country had just declared independence from the British Crown, in the spirit of governing themselves freely and that all men were created equal under the sky. When Thomas Jefferson entered in the US Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, he probably implied that women even the slaves had rights. Women rights, however, were suppressed in the patriarchal ideology that promoted male superiority. Male dominance has been a culture perpetuated mainly by religious …show more content…
They had no legal rights, couldn’t vote and the common law doctrine of coverture viewed women and their husbands as one body in the eyes of God. A woman’s role was to bear and raise children, take of the household and submit to their husbands’ rules. In the Puritan community for example, “the church embraced the ideal of virtuous women as chaste, submissive, wives and mothers who served God by serving men.” The church also preached mutual respect in conjugal relationship. In some jurisdiction domestic violence was treated as family affairs and the laws granted husbands the rights to discipline their children and spouses using physical force. Women could obtain dissolution of marriage for a couple of reasons, abandonment and adultery. Divorce was not granted for domestic violence except for one case recorded in Connecticut in the late 1780s, after the husband confessed to excessively batter his wife. Little was done to contain domestic violence against women mainly because these communities firmly held ecclesiastic views that support the ideology of men superiority over
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