Rule of Thumb versus Rule of Law

Published In

Men and Masculinities

Document Type

Citation

Publication Date

7-2002

Subjects

Women -- Violence against, Women -- Crimes against, Violence in men, Sex discrimination against women

Abstract

The community of academic, political, and street activists working for gender justice has for decades used community and political education quite effectively for advancing our aims. A central part of this effort has been a critique of the institutional structures in our society that create and reinforce male power. It is not surprising, then, that those institutions have responded with a campaign to discredit us, as noted most succinctly by Susan Faludi in her 1991 book Backlash. One standard tactic for conservative columnists is to deride feminists for creating “facts” out of thin air (see, for instance, Hallinan 1994) in their efforts to, for instance, persuade their representatives to support the Violence Against Women Act. And the conservatives are not entirely wrong. When I began to do antiviolence education in the public schools in 1985, I freely asserted what feminists I knew had told me: that the FBI says that a woman is battered every seven seconds, but I never sought a document backing this claim up. What the conservatives do not want discussed, however, is that our assertions, whether folklore or the teachings of violence survivors, are often close to reality: a modern study revealed that I erred by one second in this case. I now say that during 1992, 7 percent of women (3.9 million) who were married or “living with someone as a couple were physically abused, and 37% (20.7 million) were verbally or emotionally abused by their spouse or partner” (Harris et al. 1993, 8). That is, a woman is battered once every 8.1 seconds and verbally or emotionally abused once every 1.5 seconds. But there is one claim that we really must weed out of our language. I still hear victim advocates claim that the phrase “rule of thumb” derives from “British Common Law . . . [which] authorized a husband to ‘chastise his wife with . . . a rod not thicker than his thumb’ ” (Davidson 1977, 18). This claim is both false and unnecessary because there is much else in our sorry history that we can call to the attention of our audiences. In the following section, I will sketch the history of this false claim, and in the next two I will provide verifiable examples of ancient institutional support of woman abuse.

Rights

© 2002 Sage Publications

DOI

10.1177/1097184X02005001005

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/25889

Link to Full Text

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