Re:A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement
by dash2 on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @05:53PM
(#27838888)
But beating your kids or wife - again, in the "more than just spanking" sense of physical abuse - was often punished informally. Working-class communities had clear senses of the relevant boundaries (though again those wouldn't be the same as our boundaries necessarily) and institutions like the Charivari to support them. (Google "Rough music".)
In 1900, a husband beating his wife wasn't even illegal in most of the world. [1] Beating children and other animals would barely even register as unusual.
[1] It wasn't practically illegal in most of the US, both on the state & federal level until the late 20th century - https://www.cji.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/domestic_abus...