To be completley flabbergasted that rape within marriage wasn't a crime for so long?

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It was made illegal in 1991. I was born in 1988 so it was still legal in my lifetime.

I actually only found this out recently as I'm doing an access to law course at college and I'm still completely that it was legal for so long and within my lifetime.

I actually have an essay to write and I have to talk about the case which resulted in it becoming a criminal offence and it got me thinking about it again.

Seriously though, wtf! Why was it made illegal earlier? I think if someone had asked me prior to starting my college course when it was made a illegal I probably would have assumed the 1960's or the 70's at a push but the 1990's! Seriously!

I married in 1988 my new husband mention his conjugal rights on our honeymoon. I had never heard of conjugal right s we had never talk about them ever . I never thought just as we were married he rights to body it had never came in conversation before we were married. I thought he was joking but he was not . I never got over it . We we married a long but our sex life was shit from that moment on . Could never get my head around the fact that as we were married I had to have sex with him.

YANBU, it's shocking.

And if i remember correctly (i might be talking out of my ass), it's even more shocking that rape laws were made to protect the interest men(father/husband) had in their women,rather than protect the women themselves.

I've read arguments made before the law changed

I wonder if those are still available to read somewhere but I wouldn't know where to start looking tbh. Would I find them in newspaper or magazine articles from around that time period? Not that I have any idea where I would start looking for them either mind...

It's so shocking. Our rights are so fragile, and we are currently walking in a precipice blindfold. I hope we still have all our hard won rights in a decade, flash forwards to New Year's Day 2027...

AVirgin - I just got books from the library, but I googled now ('social attitudes to rape prior to 1991') and there are masses of published papers and texts, some more downloadable than others. I don't know if there's a good collected source of them.

Birdsgottafly This comment that you made \below/ really made me think. So thank you.

NB I remember hearing the matital tape outlaw news about this -I'd have been 10. And I was flabbergasted then.

It was a very different time and I wish some people would be kinder to older Women, when they seem concerned about Women going out on their own etc. If you were raped, the attitude was that you shouldn't have been out. Women couldn't move freely in Society and expect protection, in my lifetime, I'm 48

DYAC

In 1978, I was told by the police that my then-husband could not be prosecuted for rape even though we were separated and I had filed for divorce. Forcible marital rape was made a crime in the state we lived in the same year our divorce became final (1979), but rape by threat, coercion, or lack of ability to consent was not made a crime until the early '90s.

That's horrifying Across.

Isadora I'm not foolish enough to think that you truly know anyone. I wouldn't marry if I had to hand over all my cash. I thought very seriously about children with my current DH as we live in a Hague Convention country that is not my own. Knowing he essentially has power over where I live for a long time... and I love and trust him. I wouldn't hand that power to anyone, husband or not.

What would you have done, MrsTP?

How would you have managed to live?

You're assuming there were other good alternatives to getting married (or, indeed, handing over all your cash on marriage, which women have also had to do in the past). But there have also been laws severely restricting what independence women could get, and I mentioned guarantors upthread. Less recently, but still well within living memory, women were heavily discouraged from working, even if they were unmarried, and many jobs simply weren't open to them.

Btw I was in an awful marriage, he changed the moment we got married, and I was so ashamed I hid it from the world, and myself for many years. Until DS was on the way, and the boundaries of the abuse kept being pushed, and I started to mumsnet (!).

Took me 2 years after I'd managed to get us free that I realized I was raped by him. That's two and a half years after it dawned on me I was being emotionally, physically, socially and financially abused.

(Well, when I say 'dawned', it was more of a dawn breaking with the emphasis on breaking as mumsnetters descended with great big bloody hammers 🔨 to point out the huge signs of intolerable abuse!)

Anyway, I digress. The point being I didn't realize what it was even when it was so clear... I just couldn't get my head around it. I'd actually been told by a 'marriage counsellor' that i was refusing sex as a power game and I should stop, immediately, as I was in fact the aggressor if I refused it. I had told this person what happened with the details below, but it didn't matter to her. Or of course to my husband.

And I believed her, though I am not stupid... yet somehow I was about this. I had internalized society's messages growing up, and although I knew I was suffering and something was not right about this situation... other people's messages over ruled mine, the quiet whisper in my head.

Below: tmi please skip if needs be sorry

It wasn't just once or twice by the way, it was hundreds of times over the years, and I'd be crying and saying no, it hurts etc, if I was awake of course. He saw the blood but I guess he just didn't give a shit. And I'd be trying to avoid him until the err, damage healed.

But no, he believed, probably still believes that I was the horrible one. And he was backed up by society.

So sadly I can well believe it. I hope our children grow up to know how wrong this is... but I worry this won't happen.

That is one fucked up, cuntbadger counsellor. I assume the focus was on "fixing" the marriage rather than your feelings,pain and abuse.

LRD I'm talking about the 1980s rather than earlier.

And actually I come from an odd family. Three generations of single mothers before me. Grandmothers had jobs in orphanages and clothing manufacturers. Very hard and very poor but they lived. One married, had two children, and he left her young (and he didn't financially contribute) and the other had a baby out of wedlock and got married much later to another man. Even great grandma was widowed very young. Which was 'acceptable' and he died leaving her OK. Which helped her help grandmother.

I'd love to know more but most of that was very hush hush and I didn't find out until people had died.

Xposted with Misc.

Mtp 3 generations of strong independent female single parents. Women who actually found jobs,made a life for themselves or simply just made it. Success stories you could even say. And they still felt the need to keep it hush hush and "take their secrets to the grave".

Interesting, right? Not just their graves. The graves of the people around them. And there are still family members (of sort of my generation) who call the father of GM's baby her 'husband' even though he never was and they didn't even spend very long together. I correct them and lo and behold next time...

GM's sister danced on the stage in 'only feathers' as well. I wish they had all kept diaries that I could find in a loft.

What was the general reaction like? I've heard that a lot of people disagreed with the change in the law and thought women were getting too uptight but surely that can't be true. Apparently the general consensus was that the only people who thought it should be illegal and that a husband could rape his wife were "crazy feminazis"...

I remember there being a sense of "about time to", of legislation catching up with society and attitudes

Of course, the nonsense about "not promoting" homosexuality was still in force and it was just after Thatcher went and at the start of the rather listless Major years so there was a lot of law and policy in force that seemed bizarre and out of touch to many of us (i was late teens).

^about time too

MTP My mum is convinced she was cursed and that's why she was unmarried until she was(shock!horror!) 28! Grandma took her to a priest and he did some mumbo jumbo and voila all got sorted and she met dad. Because obviously an unmarried woman of that age just had to had so ething "unnatural " wrong with her.

OP sorry for derailing.

It even took until 1993 for it to be made illegal in all US states.

This is true but it is important to point out that the first states began making it possible to prosecute marital rape, by eliminating the marital exemption, in the mid-late 1970s. My state did so in 1983.

Misc my DH recently (within the last couple of years) saw posters on the toilet doors at work listing signs of domestic abuse - one of them was withholding sex. To me that's a very dangerous statement to make and open massively to abuse. Unfortunately it seems as though what you were told may not the fucked up beliefs of just one counsellor but a widespread (?) belief?

the nonsense about "not promoting" homosexuality was still in force

Section 28 wasn't repealed till 2003 - and it only came in in 1988. Mind you, you can still find people who basically agree with it, as nothing to date has stopped homophobia.

Glove i'd say any counsellor worth their salt would know that the response to domestic abuse by withholding sex,is not to take it by force. But i'm very black and white when it comes to people in a position of trust dismissing,minimising and victim blaming.