The Violent Abuse of Women

In 17th and 18th Century Britain

Geoffrey Pimm

• Publisher: Pen & Sword History
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526751621
• eBook ISBN: 9781526739551
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

A comprehensive study of the pervasive misogyny that left women behind while British society moved toward the Age of Enlightenment.
 
Although the worlds of science and philosophy took giant strides away from the medieval view of the world, attitudes to women did not change from those that had pertained for centuries. The social turbulence of the first half of the seventeenth century afforded women new opportunities and new religious freedoms, and women were attracted into the many new sects where they were afforded a voice in preaching and teaching. These new and unprecedented liberties thus gained by women were perceived as a threat by the leaders of society, and thus arose an unlikely masculine alliance against the new feminine assertions, across all sections of society from Puritan preachers to judges, from husbands to court rakes.
 
This reaction often found expression in the violent and brutal treatment of women who were seen to have stepped out of line, whether legally, socially or domestically. Often beaten and abused at home by husbands exercising their legal right, they were whipped, branded, exiled and burnt alive by the courts, from which their sex had no recourse to protection, justice or restitution.
 
This work records the many kinds of violent physical and verbal abuse perpetrated against women in Britain and her colonies, both domestically and under the law, during two centuries when huge strides in human knowledge and civilization were being made in every other sphere of human activity, but social and legal attitudes to women and their punishment remained firmly embedded in the medieval.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Domestic Violence
• Chapter 2 Sexual Abuse
• Chapter 3 Libel & Slander
• Chapter 4 Abduction & Clandestine Marriage
• Chapter 5 The Smart of the Lash
• Chapter 6 Burned Alive
• Chapter 7 An Exiled World
• Chapter 8 At the Mercy of the Mob
• Chapter 9 Locked in the Cage
• Chapter 10 Hot Iron & Cold Steel
• Chapter 11 Hanged by the ‘Bloody Code’
• Chapter 12 Male Impersonators & Female Actors
• Chapter 13 Seen But Not Heard
• Chapter 14 Gracing the Stool
• Chapter 15 Religious Belief: Persecution & Punishment
• Chapter 16 Suffer a Witch
• Chapter 17 Military Wives & Camp Followers
• Chapter 18 The Morality Police
• Chapter 19 The ‘Whipping Toms’
• Chapter 20 Growing Distaste & Abolition
• Appendix A ‘How the Women went from Dover’ 1662 – John Greenleaf Whittier
• Appendix B ‘The Ducking Stool’ 1780 – Benjamin West
• Appendix C Trial of Eleanor Beare 1732 – Sentenced to be Pilloried & Imprisoned
• Appendix D Trial of Elizabeth Cammell 1783 – Sentenced to be Severely Whipped & Hard Labour
• Appendix E Tariff of Corporal Punishments – Female Apprentices in Jamaica – 1858
• Appendix F Seventeenth & Eighteenth Century Slang – Women’s Bodies, Characters & Professions
• Appendix G Women Burned at the Stake 1721–1789
• Appendix H A Woman’s Tyburn ‘Hanging Day’
• Appendix I Benefit of Clergy
• Appendix J Relative Value of Money
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Plate section