Recently a friend wrote me asking about studies suggesting that women "are just as violent as men in domestic situations. I answered:

You are confusing incidents with intensity. It is not even remotely true that "women are just a violent in a domestic setting as men." There is some evidence that women are as or more willing to express themselves in minor violence which might cause a man a little pain but do him　no great harm. In every society men are far more willing to engage in serious physical violence and the more aberrant the man the greater the probability.

Some years ago I posted the following which is relevant:

So far as can be told, in every society violence is primarily a male phenomenon. Men who murder do so for a variety of reasons and they kill the majority of murder victims – whether those victims are men or women.

In contrast, women commit only a fairly small percentage of murders and the "victims" of those "murders" are almost always men who have abused the women. That is to say, while not necessarily self-defense (because it may come well after they have been beaten rather than in immediate defense), When women kill they usually have good reason and the deceased’s demise is a net gain for society. This is not to deny that there are occasionally evil women whose crimes approximate those of male murderers. See, e.g. Henry H. Brownstein, et al., "Women Who Kill in Drug Market Situations," 12 JUSTICE Q. 473 (1995).

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　　　 The foregoing is by way of introducing the following abstract:

"Intimate Homicide: Gender and Crime Control, 1880-1920"

U of Colorado Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 06-University of Colorado Law Review, Vol. 77, p. 101, 2006 Contact: CAROLYN B. RAMSEY

University of Colorado Law School

Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Auth Page:http://ssrn.com/author=526116

Abstract: http://ssrn.com/abstract=817126

The received wisdom, among feminists and others, is that historically the criminal justice system tolerated male violence toward women. Drawing on previously unexplored archival material, Intimate Homicide: Gender and Crime Control, 1880 1920 demonstrates that this story is in need of revision. It dramatically revises feminist understanding of the legal history of public responses to intimate homicide by showing that, in both the eastern and the western United States, men accused of killing their intimates often received stern punishment, whereas women charged with similar crimes were treated with leniency. Moreover, men who killed their lovers, spouses, or other family members in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were executed in larger numbers than today.

Although no formal battered woman's defense existed in the late 1800s and early 1900s, courts and juries implicitly recognized one - and even extended it to abandoned women who killed their unfaithful partners. In contrast, when men were accused of intimate murder, the provocation doctrine and other defenses were applied narrowly, and men were held to higher standards of self control. Jury verdicts and appellate opinions thus reveal concern to police masculinity by punishing men who killed their intimates and by excusing, or even justifying, women's lethal reactions to mistreatment from men. Such paternalistic efforts to condemn male abuse of women did not go uncontested; competing norms led to a deplorable failure to prevent domestic violence from occurring. Nevertheless, the research presented here undercuts the common scholarly view that a hegemonic gender ideology tolerant of extreme violence against women controlled public responses to intimate homicide. This article is not simply a matter of interest to legal historians. Rather, it also requires criminal law scholars and feminists, such as the author, to re-examine the underpinnings of their theories

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KATES COMMENT:

1. ALL-MALES JURIES: The body of Prof. Ramsey’s paper tells the following as epitomizing the phenomenon she is describing: c. 1890 a woman had been impregnated by her boyfriend who then refused to marry her. She went out and bought a gun, loading it w/ the ammunition she also bought. She then visited every place her boyfriend was likely to be found, did find him and emptied the gun into him. The jury was out for about ten minutes, most of which was devoted to electing the foreman, and returmed a verdict of not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.

2. JURIES W/ WOMEN: Several years ago a woman in TX was tried for using her car to run down, and repeatedly running over, her philandering husband. Under TX law the jury could have acquitted her, convicted but given her probationm or sentenced her to prison. Unlike the all-male juries Prof. Ramsey studied, the TX jury, half or more of whom were female, gave her 20-to life. The explanation, I believe, is this: every woman on that jury had been done dirt by a male lover or knew other women who had. One might think that that would make them sympathetic to the defendant. But none of those women killed the man so why should the defendant get away with it?

I would suggest a simple explanation for the phenomenon Prof. Ramsey found in studying all-male jury verdicts: Men do not indulge each other but they do indulge women. Likewise, women do not indulge each other but they do indulge men. I would suggest that if we had all-female juries men who killed women would do far better than they now do, and far, far better than they did when juries were all males. Nevertheless all-female juries might not be as tolerant of men who kill women than all male juries were of women who killed men because: a) women are more averse to violence; and b) male killers just seem a lot more dangerous.