Joanne Bailey ‘I dye [sic] by Inches’: locating wife beating in the concept of a privatization of marriage and violence in eighteenth-century England* Scholars argue that while men’s violence against their wives can be found in all periods, attitudes towards it have changed over time and as a result so too has its location, with a shift from an earlier ‘public’ form of marital violence to a later ‘private’ one behind closed doors. This coincides with a historiography of the family that charts its evolution over the eighteenth century into a more private institution in which neither state nor community could intervene. 1 This chronological model of change in the location of marital violence also serves as additional evidence to support the thesis that the nature of interpersonal violence changed from public to private in the same century as it moved indoors and off the streets. 2 Given the significance of the spatial dimensions of wife beating to several areas of historical enquiry, this article undertakes an in-depth mapping of its sites over the long eighteenth century. 3 It reveals that the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ cannot be simplistically equated with outdoors and indoors when applied to the locations of marital violence. There was no clear and consistent move over the course of the century from one to the other because wife beating was temporally and spatially fluid, occurring over long periods of time and over several places, moving from inside to outside and back again. *This article originated as a paper delivered to the Anglo-American Conference on ‘The Body’ at the IHR, 2003. Many thanks to all those who have read and commented upon it in its various stages of development: Michael Baker, Chris Brooks, Elaine Chalus, Anthony Fletcher, Elizabeth Foyster, Adrian Green, David Nash and John Stewart. I am also grateful to David Turner whose comments about the privatization of marriage in his review of my book helped me to formulate a framework for my research presented here. 1 L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, abridged edn (London, 1977); R. Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge, 2004). 2 R. Shoemaker, ‘Male honour and the decline of public violence in eighteenth-century London’, Social History, XXVI (2001). 3 This dimension of wife beating has only been considered briefly in order to explore the gender- ing of the home and as the possible cause of some lower-ranking violence. S. D’Cruze, Crimes of Outrage: Sex, Violence and Victorian Working Women (London, 1998), 75–6; A. J. Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-century Married Life (London, 1992), 38. Social History Vol. 31 No. 3 August 2006 Social History ISSN 0307-1022 print/ISSN 1470-1200 online ª 2006 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/03071020600763615