Blaming Her for His Violent Outbursts
The battered women’s self-help movement initially encountered resistance and opposition because of the widespread acceptance of victim-blaming argu- ments that portrayed beaten wives unsympathetically. Many people, including some counselors and family therapists, believed that a high proportion of beatings were unconsciously precipitated or even intentionally provoked. The wives who were said to be responsible for inciting their husbands’ wrath were negatively ste- reotyped as “aggressive,” “masculine,” and “sexually frigid.” Their husbands were characterized as “shy,” “sexually ineffectual,” “dependent and passive,” and even as “mothers’ boys.” The dynamics of a couple’s conflict were set into motion whenever a badgered husband tried to please and pacify his querulous and demanding wife. Eventually, her taunts and chal- lenges would provoke an explosion, and he would lose self-control (see Snell, Rosenwald, and Robey, 1964; and Faulk, 1977).
Victim blaming emphasized the wife’s alleged shortcomings: her domineering nature, her cold- ness, and her secret masochistic cravings for suffer- ing. It placed the entire burden of change on the woman—not the man, the community, or the culture that encouraged male dominance. Activists in the battered women’s movement rejected this outlook because it failed to condemn the violence and implied that it was not a criminal matter that should be addressed by police departments and courts. The husband’s main problem appeared to be his weakness rather than his resort to force to get his way (see Schechter, 1982; and Beirne and Messerschmidt, 1991).
The battered women’s movement succeeded in replacing this victim-blaming outlook with a
victim-defending one. This husband-blaming/wife- defending point of view quickly gained adherents, as journalists depicted wife beating in ways surprisingly favorable to a feminist pro-victim perspective during the 1970s and 1980s. Abusers generally were depicted in these media accounts as “super-macho” types who felt that following conventional sex-based roles gave them a right to discipline and control their wives and to beat back any challenges to their manly privileges. The targets of their wrath were pictured as stereotypi- cally feminine women who believed that a wife’s place was in the home and that she should be selflessly devoted to her husband, dependent upon him as a breadwinner, and deferential to his rightful authority.
Several progressive themes ran through most of the articles. One was that wife beating was a social problem afflicting millions and not just a personal trouble burdening only a few unfortunate women. Another was that the women did not deserve or provoke the abuse heaped upon them, and that the consequences were serious, even life- threatening. Many articles concluded that this cri- sis in a fundamental social institution, the family, should be of concern to everyone because domes- tic violence broke out at all levels of society, even if it was harder to detect in affluent families. Gov- ernmental action could bring it under control through social programs coupled with more vigor- ous criminal justice responses. Most articles identi- fied the root causes as unjust gender relations, buttressed by an ideology that proclaimed that males were superior to females. Male supremacy was perpetuated by socialization practices that exhorted boys to be aggressive, tough, and pow- erful while teaching girls to be passive, submissive, and supportive, according to a content analysis of stories and reports appearing in widely read maga- zines during the 1970s and 1980s (Loseke, 1989).