Abstract
This thesis explores the history of marital violence from the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the passage of the Family Law (Protection of Spouses and Children) Act in 1981, the first piece of legislation in post-independence Ireland to deal exclusively with family violence. We will see that while many men beat their wives with impunity, there was little public discussion of marital violence for the first fifty years of Irish independence. It was not until the early 1970s, with the arrival of the second-wave feminist movement, that the Irish ‘rediscovered’ the problem of marital violence. Once the reality of spousal abuse was widely acknowledged, change quickly followed: activists established emergency refuges for battered women and their children, the government passed a number of legislative reforms that provided protection for abused women, and the public began to more openly discuss the problem of marital breakdown.For most of the period under review, the battered woman occupied an extremely vulnerable position. It was common for a chronically abused woman to remain with her violent husband because she had no money to support herself (or her children) and no recourse to the law. Because of women’s inferior status, I argue that marital violence represented a social problem in post-independence Ireland: an abused woman had a socially determined inability to escape her husband’s violence as a result of her economic dependence, limited legal options, and social and religious expectations. Because so few women had a path of escape, I explore the ways in which they learned to cope with their abusive partners and how they resisted and responded to the violence. Additionally, I examine the meanings that contemporaries—from the troubled couples themselves to their local communities to legal professionals—assigned to marital violence. By analysing the ways in which a wider audience understood and reacted to marital violence, we can draw broader conclusions about gendered expectations within marriage, the nature of family life, and the relationship between family and community.
| Date of Award | 1 Jan 2015 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Ian McBride (Supervisor) & Patricia Thane (Supervisor) |