to think that wife-beating was deemed 'acceptable' as recently as the late 1960s?

[newmorning]

It's only in recent years that child-beating has become unacceptable in our society whereas only a few decades ago it was almost universally believed to be thoroughly beneficial to children.

But what about wives?

I was watching some old black-and-white, mid-late 1960's footage of Coronation Street recently and it seemed abundantly clear that society at that time accepted that both nice guys and nasty guys gave their wives a 'good hiding' when it was felt they deserved it.

And that was the age of The Summer of Love!

Yup I think you are right.

And that some old men having a taste for young girls was seen as a thing not to be discussed or necessarily condemned, merely sniggered at.

I saw an episode of Dad's Army the other day where they knocked on a woman's door and asked if she had one characters knickers. She said she did, the husband heard this, closed the door and we heard her being beaten. The audience laughed.
It's like a different world.

I don't know about acceptance or approval in the 60s wife beating wasn't seen as okay, from the beginning of c20th the rhetoric around violence towards women wastgat Iit was 'unmanly' or brutish behaviour.

That isn't to say it didn't happen (possibly far more regularly than today) whilst there was social disapproval there was an almost total unwillingness of the police to get involved in so called 'domestics'

The comparison between wife beating and smacking a child is pretty fatuous though. If you tried applying non corporal punishment to an adult that everyone applies to their children such as grounding (
unlawful detention) or docking pocket money (financial abyse) you'd be on the same dodgy legal and moral ground.

Thinking back to my parents talking about this (back in the 70s when I was growing up), I'd say that decent people thought it was wrong. However, two things were accepted without question which are only now beginning to be questioned (and even then not by everyone by any stretch of the imagination). One was the idea that marriage was a kind of private sphere, and what went on inside a couple's marriage was their business and no-one elses, so even if you thought the husband's behaviour was despicable and disgusting you didn't interfere. The other one was a lot of victim blaming - the sort of "why didn't the woman just leave?" attitude. (In my mum's case, she did just leave a marriage in the 1950s, with a baby, and divorce her husband - I think she maybe didn't realise that she was unusually strong, and incredibly lucky in having a career which meant she could support herself and my half sister).

And sadly, you do still see both these attitudes at work now - people who hear their neighbours suffering domestic violence but don't report, or who say "well, if it was that bad, she could leave, but she chooses to stay." I'd like us as a society to move towards a situation where DV can be prosecuted solely on the basis of forensic evidence/third party witnesses without the victim making a complaint - where such prosecutions were automatic.

And I'd also like to see (and this will be very controversial, I know) a rethink on the idea that it's automatically in the best interests of the child to maintain contact with both parents after divorce, even where one parent is a violent abuser. I'm far from convinced that this is actually the case. It seems to be accepted orthodoxy, but I've never seen any hard evidence to support the view. (I've read lots of anecdotes, but largely based on people's experience of being adopted/ brought up by one parent after the other's bolted/ finding out in their teens that they were the result of donor insemination - where people say they have a huge hole in their adult lives due to not knowing one parent. And obviously that's devastating. But it seems to me a quite different situation from having an abusive shit as one parent).

Definitely much later than that. In fact many people still find it acceptable.

I've lost count of the number of times I've been told I must have deserved or similar. I mean from those other than my ex that is.

I think it's improving slowly but maybe that's just hope and the fact I've become such a bitch with vicious hatred of abusers that people in the know no longer voice these opinions in my ear shot.

i think our understanding of dv is better

also the odd slap i do not think was considered terrible (early James Bind films i am sure he often slaps women) but most people knew it was wrong but more turned a blind eye to it

it is only about 25 years ago the law changed, before a husband could not rape his wife (well he could but not be charged with rape)

lurcio you've hit the nail on the head. That's what I was trying to get at ( very inarticulately) was that idea of the home was seen as belonging to the private sphere.

That well beloved retro novel Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day features lighthearted remarks about flighty women needing a beating and open anti semitism too.

i think even today it is tolerated,actually i dont think i know and its continuing at an alarming rate

a sad thing is some young girls see it as part of a realationship and down play it

Great point about films, Freudians. Not just the early Bond films, but loads of the films I remember from TV during my childhood - it was a staple of particularly the sort of kitchen sink drama (I think it's "Saturday Night, Sunday Morning" where they end up having a physical fight then passionate sex - it was almost a cliche, a bit of a beating then 'fantastic' make-up sex). Absolutely horrible. And in a way even more horrible than the "Dad's Army" make a joke of it attitude - because all these films were telling us that violence was a part of extreme passion and somehow romantic. I vaguely remember a Jilly Cooper novel I must have read as a student in the mid 80s where the 'hero' hits the heroine, but all is forgiven because it's in the heat of the moment, and 'it's romantic, innit?' I think I stopped reading at that point and never read any more of her stuff.

I was watching a documentary about a 70s comedian last night (I forget his name, but he was the one with the catchphrase 'Oh, you are awful - but I like you!' and David Baddiel made an interesting comment about TV reflecting society. He said something along the lines that smutty 1960s and 1970s TV comedy was the older generation's interpretation of society's changing social and moral structures, particularly relating to sex and sexual relationships (I'm not sure if I agree if this is correct, because some TV personalities were of the generation of the summer of love and seemed to have behaved as if they could sexually abuse the women around them with impunity).

Anyway, the fact that domestic abuse was on TV in the 1960s and later might not mean that it was still acceptable to society at large, just that TV's view of society was stuck 10-15-20 years in the past.

This doesn't excuse the vile behaviour, however.

Domestic violence in the 80's wasn't taken seriously by the police.

My dad beat my mum quite often. One time he gave her a black eye and she called the police. The police didn't want to charge him in case he came back and did worse. He was a bullying coward and in fact never hit mum again but to us it felt like the police were being cowardly.
At their divorce the judge wouldn't make him pay alimony as he didn't want an ex husband beating his ex wife to force her to drop the claim. This had happened before apparently.
Why wasn't the authorities trying to punish and stop the abusers. In both cases they made the woman feel she had to suffer the beatings or the consequences.

My parents were born in the 60s and I have heard my Dad say "That's just the way things were then." in reference to both of my grandmothers being beaten up by my grandfathers.

He didn't agree that it was acceptable but he made it clear that much of his parents' generation did.