‘A tyrant and tormentor’: violence against wives in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland

Abstract

There has recently been a tremendous new awareness of male violence against women, an awareness which spans the academic world, the services that come in contact with it, and popular initiatives. Edinburgh District Council's Zero Tolerance campaign (which arose out of a report on adolescents' knowledge about, and attitude to, domestic violence) began in 1992 and was a landmark in bringing this issue out into the open in Britain. Hundreds of articles have appeared in American medical journals in the last four or five years, and March 1995 saw the launch of a new interdisciplinary journal, entitled simply Violence Against Women. And of all the women who suffer violence, the greatest number are wives whose husbands abuse them.