Title: The inward fire
Description: This dissertation examines narratives about cruelty in marriage produced in the era leading up to and encompassing the first women's rights campaign against domestic violence. By reading reform literature alongside divorce records from two well-known centers of antebellum woman's rights activism, Boston, Massachusetts, and Seneca County, New York, this study places the emergence of the idea that every wife had the right to freedom from physical coercion within the context of a proliferation of actual wives' stories of marital cruelty. The thesis brings literature on the history of domestic violence into dialogue with scholarship on antebellum domesticity, reform, and law, and asks how the repetitive cycles of marital violence became a political problem at this time while nevertheless persisting in similar patterns throughout the period, and far beyond. Stories generated by the rapid increase in divorce litigation in this period, by the temperance and woman's rights movements, and in a number of autobiographical accounts each retold the old story of wife beating, all the while fashioning novel meanings from a familiar tale. Legal records gave accounts of domestic violence that sound remarkably like those found in previous and later historical periods. In spite of legal and cultural trends repudiating a head of household's traditional right to chastisement, wives repeatedly told of physical brutality and verbal abuse, husbands justified violence with reference to their spouses' misconduct, and extended families continued to play a central role in mitigating marital conflicts. At the same time, reform and divorce stories also crafted innovative interpretations of marital cruelty.

Litigants and activists placed new focus on the destructive effects of domestic violence not just on individuals but also on the emotionally charged notion of "home," they generated a complex analysis of its origins in society and law, and made the argument that it was every wife's right and even duty to escape abuse. This thesis argues that attention to mechanisms of persistence and movements for change are both equally necessary to understanding this and indeed many other moments in a timeline of domestic violence that has extended from the earliest reaches of recorded history to our own day.