Who-Stole-Feminism.-How-Women-Have-Betrayed-Women

NOBLE LIES 205use by the late seventeenth century. 52Hiscock could not track the sourceof the idea that the term derives from a principle governing wife beating,but he believes it is an example of "modern folklore" and compares it toother "back-formed explanations," such as the claim that asparagus comesfrom "sparrow-grass" or that "ring around the rosy" is about the bubonicplague.We shall see that Hiscock's hunch was correct, but we must begin byexonerating William Blackstone (1723-80), the Englishman who codifiedcenturies of disparate and inchoate legal customs and practices into theelegant and clearly organized tome known as Commentaries on the Laws ofEngland. The Commentaries, universally regarded as a classic of legal literature,became the basis for the development of American law. The socalledrule of thumb as a guideline for wife beating does not occur inBlackstone's compendium, although he does refer to an ancient law thatpermitted "domestic chastisement":The husband ... by the old law, might give his wife moderate correction.For, as he is to answer for her misbehaviour, the lawthought it reasonable to intrust him with this power of restrainingher, by domestic chastisement, in the same moderation that a manis allowed to correct his apprentices or children. . . . But this powerof correction was confined within reasonable bounds and the husbandwas prohibited from using any violence to his wife. . . . Butwith us, in the politer reign of Charles the Second, this power of correctionbegan to be doubted; and a wife may now have security of the peaceagainst her husband. . . . Yet [among] the lower rank of people . . .the courts of law will still permit a husband to restrain a wife of herliberty in case of any gross misbehaviour [emphasis added]. 53Blackstone plainly says that common law prohibited violence againstwives, although the prohibitions went largely unenforced, especiallywhere the "lower rank of people" were concerned.In America, there have been laws against wife beating since before theRevolution. By 1870, it was illegal in almost every state; but even beforethen, wife-beaters were arrested and punished for assault and battery. 54The historian and feminist Elizabeth Pleck observes in a scholarly articleentitled "Wife-Battering in Nineteenth-Century America":It has often been claimed that wife-beating in nineteenth-centuryAmerica was legal. . . . Actually, though, several states passed stat-