One phrase that stuck with me from the time I was a history postgraduate student was “to bounce a boot off her now and then”. It was the title of a 1997 article by historian Elizabeth Steiner-Scott on domestic violence in post-famine Ireland, highlighting that “between 1853 and 1920 in the Criminal Index Files in the National Archives in Dublin, there are recorded 1,012 appeals by men convicted of beating their wives, mothers, and sisters”, seeking to have their sentences revoked or reduced.
These were not hidden crimes; the cases before the petty sessions and police courts that led to the convictions were frequently reported in the newspapers in the 1870s and 1880s. Many wives did not want their husbands prosecuted or imprisoned but merely warned.
In 1872, for example, William Kelly, a 34-year-old wire worker from Dublin, was sentenced to three months hard labour for severely beating and cutting his wife. At the trial his wife testified that “when he asked me for spirits and when I gave him none, he locked me in the room and struck me five times ... and cut me five times severely. He has frequently beaten me on other occasions. He tore the eye out of his own child last night thinking she was I.” In her “memorial” however, she asked that he be released due to the family’s destitution. Poverty meant that the crisis in the family was not seen as violence, but an economic one born of losing the male breadwinner. She said that she had provoked him but the appeal was dismissed, and he had to serve his sentence.
Steiner-Scott’s research made it clear the rate of recidivism was high and suggested “the leniency with which wife-beating was treated by the courts must have led battered wives to question the wisdom of seeking the protection of the law”, while the detail reported in newspapers was seen as a public humiliation. Most cases of abuse, of course, never came near a court.
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In any event, there was little public protest about the crimes that were publicised and the violence continued to be common. In 1919 the Irish Citizen newspaper, established by the Irish Franchise League in 1912, published a detailed article by Elizabeth McCracken under the title “Wife Beating”, castigating the ease with which husbands could beat their wives with impunity behind closed doors: “an age old tradition prevails that in matrimonial affairs what transpires in the home must be carefully concealed from the world without.” This gave a “sense of security” to the “ruthless tyrant” abuser. McCracken also noted how so many victims remained silent because of their social or financial position.
It was not unusual for men to be unapologetic about the violence. Republican Dorothy Macardle, part of the large group of anti-Treaty women imprisoned during the Civil War, recorded how, in responding to the force being used against them in Kilmainham, one inmate asked the prison governor “whether woman-beating was a soldier’s work”. He replied, “I don’t mind that, I have beaten my wife.” Such was the extent of the continued casualness and pervasiveness of violence against women that when the American anthropologists Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball carried out fieldwork in Co Clare in the 1930s for the book that became Family and Community in Ireland (1940), they found in some cases it was acceptable to beat a childless wife for being “barren”, or “to bounce a boot off her now and then for it”, as one husband explained.
It is 50 years since Nuala Fennell became the first chair of Women’s Aid. The previous year, in 1974, she published a short book, Irish marriage – how are you! One chapter was titled: “Wife-beating – a husband’s prerogative?” Conscious of the experiences of Irish women who had been forced to leave Ireland with their children to seek protection in the UK, and more publicity being given to wife beating in the UK, she moved to establish what became Women’s Aid. In seeking support, she wrote a letter to The Irish Times decrying the “solitary misery” so many victims in Ireland were enduring, while adding, “I have seen women who have had their faces cut with a carving knife”.
Fifty years on, despite greater awareness, extensive research, legislative change and more prosecutions, this is not a story with a happy ending. This week it was reported that last year Women’s Aid heard 41,432 disclosures of abuse against women by a partner or ex-partner, up 17 per cent on the 2023 figure, and the highest in the organisation’s history. Its chief executive Sarah Benson points to the scale of the “barriers for women seeking safety and justice”.
Historians of violence against women have often commented on the lack of public outcry about this problem. Will historians looking back on the early 21st century in Ireland do likewise?
