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Changing Discourses of Marital Violence in Sweden from the Age of Reformation to the Late Nineteenth Century
Author(s) -
Liliequist Jonas
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
gender and history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-0424
pISSN - 0953-5233
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2010.01620.x
Subject(s) - wife , sociology , gender studies , order (exchange) , stereotype (uml) , phenomenon , action (physics) , domestic violence , law , political science , poison control , suicide prevention , psychology , social psychology , economics , medicine , physics , environmental health , finance , quantum mechanics
This article analyses how public attention to marital violence in Sweden changed from a question of maintaining good order and ambitions to discipline self‐indulgent house tyrants into responsible masters of households in the seventeenth century, to the vanishing of the house tyrant as a cultural stereotype in favour of the female shrew in the eighteenth century, following the formal abolition of the husband's legal right to chastise his wife and an equalisation of liabilities and responsibilities. It also traces the beginnings of the social marginalisation and silencing of marital violence in the nineteenth century as a phenomenon associated with the lower classes and regulated by the law as a case for private action only when committed within the household circle.