Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 8, 2025
A long list of disqualifying crimes was added, including wife-beating and conviction for vagrancy. As if this were not enough, after 1903 an applicant for registration might be required to state where he had lived during the preceding five years, the name or names by which known, and the names of his employers.
How do we know but what that wife-beater loved his wife dearly before marriage, and she did not care for him? His home was unhappy, and so he took to drink and to wife-beating."
Yet the lower rank of people, who were always fond of the old common law, still claim and exert their ancient privilege; and the courts of law will still permit a husband to restrain a wife of her liberty, in case of any gross misbehaviour." Doubtless what Mr. Weller, Sr., describes as the "amiable weakness" of wife-beating was not necessarily confined to the "lower rank."
It was apparently their sole form of sustenance. The Irishman is very good to his wife, although the courting is a matter of business, as I have shown. Wife-beating and even more ignoble forms of marital cruelty are almost unknown. This is surely a big national asset.
Idealism only means that we should consider a poker in reference to poking before we discuss its suitability for wife-beating; that we should ask if an egg is good enough for practical poultry-rearing before we decide that the egg is bad enough for practical politics.
For instance, before he invented birth he dared not have lost his temper; for if he had killed Eve he would have been lonely and barren to all eternity. But when he invented birth, and anyone who was killed could be replaced, he could afford to let himself go. He undoubtedly invented wife-beating; and that was another step down. One of his sons invented meat-eating.
The courage of a gipsy woman, on the other hand, has passed into a proverb; nothing seems to daunt her, and yet she will allow her husband, a cowardly ruffian himself, perhaps, to strike her without returning the blow. Wife-beating, however, is not common among the gipsies.
Law-making was also influenced by the idea of woman as property. For a long time there was a hesitancy to prohibit wife-beating on account of the feeling that the wife was the husband's possession, to be dealt with as he desired. The laws of coverture also perpetuated the old property taboos, and gave to the husband the right to dispose of his wife's property.
At one time the English laws regulated the conditions under which a man might beat his wife. "The stick," said the law, "must not be thicker than the husband's thumb." Some Englishmen have very thick thumbs, and the law was doubtless hard on some thin, worn-out women. But that law is no longer needed. Men have outgrown the need of regulations in wife-beating.
"Off with you! you poor creature, you! Sophy Traill had a bad bargain with the like of you, you drunken, lying, savage-like, wife-beating pretence o' a husband!" "Mother' Mother!" cried Christina, coming hastily forward; "Mother, what are you saying at all?" "The God's truth, Christina, that and nothing else.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking