Also, people often had daily contact with their neighbors and kin. Neighbors knew what was going on inside each other's houses and intervened when necessary. That intervention was the first line of defense. As a result of their lifestyle, she said, they were physically strong and able to fight back more effectively. Pederson is organizing the book around different ethnic groups, she said.
Some groups are more tolerant than others and have different expectations.
Most of the book will focus on women who killed their husbands, simply because the same amount of evidence doesn't exist when a man killed his wife because the wife wasn't around to testify to the abuse. Women in abusive relationships who killed in self-defense at the turn of the century in rural Wisconsin were treated more fairly than women who kill in similar circumstances today, Pederson said. Today the average woman convicted in these circumstances spends 25 years in prison, considerably more than the five to six years women served in the late 1800s and early 1900s, she said. Pederson said she hopes to look at how the justice system has changed over time when dealing with cases of death resulting from abuse, and why those changes are occurring, she said. That was not an effective first line of defense then and it isn't now.