The Household and Intimate Violence

When the Pilgrims settled Plymouth in 1620, they came not as individuals but as a community. They spent the first winter together in a single structure and, when spring arrived, they sowed seeds together in collectively owned fields.

Throughout the colonial era the household was the primary unit of government. It consisted of parents and children as well as live-in workers such as servants and slaves. The organisation of the household was hierarch­ical and gendered, with the father/master the undisputed head. Carole Shammas estimates that 80 per cent of English colonists came under the purview of a household head. In the first generation of settlement, colonial governments passed laws imbuing the household head with a great deal of power over his dependants. Included in these was the prerogative to disci­pline wives, children and servants through moderate physical correction. Removing punishment from the state to the household left dependants at the whims of the household head and created opportunities for abuse. Only rarely did the authorities intervene. When Hannah Dyre was beaten by her husband she told her neighbours, showing one a wound on her head ‘which she said her Husband had broke with a stick of wood'.

Giving the household head nearly unrestricted power was a deviation from English law and a practical response to weak civil and religious institu­tions in America. Although colonial authorities occasionally legislated against householder tyranny, such laws often went unenforced. In 1641 Massachusetts determined that ‘Everie marryed woeman shall be free from bodilie correction or stripes by her husband', an innovation that Elizabeth Pleck argues was among ‘the first laws against spousal abuse enacted any­where in the Western world'.11 However, the law provided little protection for abused wives. Middlesex County, Massachusetts, heard only seven cases of wife beating between 1649 and 1699; the Plymouth courts heard only four between 1663 and 1682. Moreover, legal punishment of spousal abuse declined over time. Only two wife-beating cases in Middlesex County came after 1663, while complaints in Plymouth declined to one per decade in the 1680s before disappearing altogether after 1700. As Ann Little observes, the courts were more interested in prosecuting wives for beating their husbands than the reverse.^[424]

The problem of abusive husbands was compounded by the difficulty of divorce in early America. Marriage was understood as a lifelong commitment and rarely did governments dissolve marital unions. Of the fewer than forty full divorces (a vinculo) granted in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, none were allowed for cruelty alone. Likewise, Connecticut only terminated marriages for physical abuse if the husband was also guilty of adultery or abandonment.^[425] Virginia allowed only partial divorces (a mensa et thoro), effectively a legal separation. When Mary Savory petitioned for divorce because her husband's ‘inhumane usage' threatened her ‘life as well as her bodily health...

Deference to the household head also informed ideas about rape. Rape was a capital crime under English law, and the colonial courts could be fierce in their prosecution of rapists. In 1636 a Massachusetts court heard the case of Edward Woodley, an indentured servant who broke into a neighbour's house and sexually assaulted a female servant. Woodley was swiftly and harshly punished as his crime confirmed colonial expecta­tions about rape: it was perpetrated by an outsider who violated another man's household.^[427] But few rape cases were this clear cut. Male sexual power was thought of as normative, thus obfuscating a woman's resistance and discrediting her consent. Moreover, rape did not always involve stran­gers but often came at the hands of relatives and friends. The contradiction between belief and reality consequently complicated exactly what consti­tuted rape. Although it was claimed that ‘the Oath of a Common Strumpet' was enough to convict a man of rape, most colonial juries were suspicious of a woman's testimony. According to Sharon Block, jurists carefully considered if a woman concealed the incident and if she screamed during the assault to determine if the encounter was consensual. Courts also wanted to know if there had been penetration as this allowed them to distinguish between rape and attempted rape, the latter being punished less severely.^[428]

Individual sexual brutality rarely resulted in judicial violence. Court records indicate that colonists were reluctant to prosecute men for rape, especially if conviction resulted in execution. Massachusetts judged fourteen cases of rape and three cases of attempted rape between 1636 and 1692, but only one man was hanged for raping an unmarried woman.

Ultimately, rape was a matter of household governance. Lawmakers under­stood it as a grave threat to the authority of the household head and thus, Thomas Foster argues, ‘Rape was a crime between men as well as a crime against a woman'. A rapist offended the ability of a husband or father to protect his dependants, so male relatives of a rape victim could sue for financial damages. Moreover, colonial courts were more than willing to blame the victim. If a woman charged a man with rape, but the court found that the encounter was consensual, the woman could be fined or whipped for fornication. 1⁸

Although there were broad similarities in the official treatment of gendered violence in the American colonies, religion and race gave rise to variation. Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 by the Society of Friends (Quakers), a religious sect that attached profound spiritual significance to the family and child-rearing. 1⁹ Consequently, the colony took a hard line against spousal abuse and rape. Between 1682 and 1801 the provincial court heard as many as 887 cases of assault and battery involving married couples and convicted eleven of four­teen men for murdering their wives. Quaker theology also shaped Pennsylvania's rape law as the Friends' disdain for capital punishment initially led the colony to prescribe estate forfeiture, imprisonment and hard labour for convicted rapists.

Racial inequality also shaped notions of gendered violence. As African American slavery rapidly expanded after 1680 so the colonial governments adjusted their laws to harshly punish black men for raping white women. Pennsylvania's reluctance to execute rapists did not cross the colour line as it meted out death for ‘any negro' who ‘shall commit a rape or ravishment upon any white woman'.^[433] During a ferry ride from Bristol to Portsmouth, Comfort Dennis Taylor claimed that a slave named Cuffee tried to rape her. Horrified that the colony's law was not harsh enough to punish Cuffee sufficiently, the Rhode Island legislature quickly wrote a law for ‘Negroes attempting to commit Rapes on white Women', demanding they be branded, whipped and sold out of the colony. Conversely, black women were not protected by colonial rape laws, nor could black men sue for the sexual assault of their wives and daughters.^[434]

African American men were routinely and harshly prosecuted for the rape of white women. In Connecticut, all three men executed for rape in the eighteenth century were black. Kirsten Fischer identifies fourteen white women who charged white men with rape in colonial North Carolina, but only two of these accusations resulted in a trial and neither was convicted. By contrast, all twelve enslaved men accused of rape were executed. African American men also faced grotesque physical torture. Although Pennsylvania's law for castrat­ing white rapists was short-lived, this punishment became de rigueur for black men throughout the colonies. Some alleged black rapists were executed by burning and their bodies deformed after death.^[435]