Elizabeth Foyster - Marital Violence: An English Family History

In my extensive internet search and analysis of government statistics, I have found it almost impossible to gather solid quantitative statistics on domestic violence before the late 1900s. However, the general trend is that abuse has become rightfully less normalised in society due to the role of women and their rights improving throughout history.

Elizabeth Foyster wrote her book called Marital Violence: An English Family History 1660-1857. In response to a review on her book from Professor Gail Savage of St Mary's College of Maryland, Foyster's viewpoint related to my project, and I found it useful to include in my research. 

She states, "I decided against quantitative analysis because I thought that such an approach would be misleading. We will never know how much marital violence occurred in the past."

This quote is entirely true. Unfortunately, we will never know the exact figures and every individual story of those who suffered due to domestic violence, which increases the difficulty of trying to establish how revolutionary each law was in reducing it. 

https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/551