Law, Race, and the Labor Politics of Wife-Beating

• In Event: Histories of Racial Governance and Resistance

Abstract

Scholars of law and social control have long examined how legal regimes regulate family life, but the origins of the South’s early domestic violence laws reveal how racialized household governance was bound up with the political economy of emancipation. Why did the first U.S. domestic violence laws emerge in the South? I argue they were not the product of a moral awakening, but of a shifting political economy in which white elites sought to recalibrate patriarchal authority after emancipation. Using archival analysis of nineteenth‑century appellate case records, periodicals, and Freedmen’s Bureau records, I show that these laws functioned less as protections for women than as instruments of law and social control, reasserting racialized household governance under new socio‑legal conditions. By situating the South’s early adoption of such laws within the intertwined histories of labor control, family regulation, and state‑building across the ante‑ and postbellum periods, the analysis reframes the regulation of wife‑beating as a tool of social order rather than a straightforward advance in women’s rights.

Author

• Margo M. Mahan, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor