“Muerta por su marido”: communal rejection of violence against women in Spain (1890–1936)

Abstract

This article studies the communal rejection of the violence women suffered at the hands of men in Spain between 1890 and 1930. The physical and verbal abuse of women was one of the many conflicts recorded in the long transition spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although it has aroused less historiographic interest than other forms of violence which have been attributed to political, economic, and religious motives. The most violent crimes against women, the ones deemed to be the most serious, such as spousal homicide, have filled the pages of newspapers since at least the final years of the nineteenth century. They scandalized public opinion and sometimes roused local communities to seek the perpetrator's exemplary punishment. The study of these collective actions sheds light on the ability of contemporary society to deal with behaviors that exceeded the threshold of the permissible through which I analyze the bundle of norms, beliefs, values and notions on gender that justified or gave meaning to these communal sanctions, their relationship with people's perception of the State and its legal system, and how these actions were reported in newspapers. The primary sources for this study are comprised of selections from Spain's national and provincial press: the documentation of these episodes in the national newspapers helped guide further research into the provincial publications that corresponded to the location of each crime and provided additional information about these crimes.