‘I dye [sic] by Inches': locating wife beating in the concept of a privatization of marriage and violence in eighteenth-century England

Theories of privatization have become central to the social, cultural and gender histories of eighteenth-century England. In particular the concept has been applied to marriage, seeing it as evolving over time into a more private institution, and to interpersonal violence, suggesting that it moved indoors and off the streets by the end of the eighteenth century. The location of marital violence functions as a lynchpin in both models, with the proposal that it shifted from a public to a private activity over the same period. Thus this article maps the location of wife beating over the long eighteenth century. The spatial context is important because recent research demonstrates that space shapes social and power relationships and produces and constructs violence. Crucially, an analysis of the sites of wife beating develops further previous spatial and linguistic analysis of the public/private distinction to demonstrate that the terms 'public' and 'private' cannot be simplistically equated with outdoors and indoors. Contemporaries equated 'private' with secret or hidden abuse and 'public' with open or witnessed abuse, rather than home or not-home. Furthermore it rejects a chronological model of wife beating's retreat out of sight by revealing that class and changing ideals of masculinity interacted with the material environment to shape the visibility of marital violence. Thus this article demonstrates that wife beating cannot be deployed unproblematically to support sweeping narratives of a privatization of marriage and violence.