The "rule of thumb" joins urban legends such as dog meat in Chinese
food and razor blades in Halloween candy, the latter two also having
never happened. It is more related to the dog legend as a slur
against a social group.
The legend has it that English common law allowed a man to
beat his wife so long as it was with an instrument no wider than his
thumb. You hear variations, like, "A law in Texas." I even saw it
cited in a BBC documentary by a scholar who should know better. It
became so commonly believed that the Journal of Legal Education
published an article to debunk it. [Henry Ansgar Kelly, "Rule of
Thumb and the Folklaw of the Husband's Stick," September, 1994,
Vol. 44, p 341.]
It didn't help. It had already assumed a life of its own.
That is an indication that it's what many want to be true,
irrespective of whether it is.
Christina Hoff Sommers traced its origin to Del Martin who,
in 1976, was a coordinator of the NOW Task Force on Battered Women.
But she never coined "rule of thumb" to describe it. It also seems
that Murray Straus, the otherwise responsible family violence
researcher, contributed to her impression with a careless reference
in his scholarly work, Violence in the Family. It has since been
attributed to William Blackstone's 1770s authoritative chronicle of
English common law, Commentaries on the Laws of England, but no such
assertion is there. Quite the opposite.
Like all such legends there is a grain of truth, but taken to
remarkable extremes. Three isolated judges are believed to have
allowed limited disciplining of a wife in one of each of their
judgements. Two are recorded in the US South (1824 in Mississippi and
1868 in North Carolina), plus Francis Buller in England, circa 1782.
We only know about Buller's ruling because the records from that time
are of the public vilification of him for it. But a later biographer
found no evidence he rendered such an opinion. (Biographical
Dictionary of the Judges of England, 1870.)
Remember that, until the 1900s, if a women committed a tort,
her husband was punished for it. Men were held to account for
anything any member of their family did, so there are references to
"reasonable restraint," all heavily qualified and strictly confined
to cases where a family member could be a danger, not just to the
husband/father, but the family.
The problem with this lie is not just that any dictionary
will tell you that "rule of thumb" means using one's own judgment
instead of external ruler. (It is most commonly attributed to
carpentry, where a master would use the length, not width, of his
thumb for common measurements.) The problem is also not simply that
it is false: that it has never been legal nor even acceptable for a
man to beat his wife, as shown by the 1782 derision of such a
suggestion even then.
What makes this a particularly malicious slur against all
men and masculinity is that its opposite has always been true. The
male code has always included, "Never hit a women," and that is how
men socialize men, and always have. Masculinity is explicitly about
protection of women and children from this very kind of treatment,
and men have always vigorously enforced it among themselves.
This myth is a gender hate crime.
Women have always been able to count on protection from men,
and still do. Spinning and spreading such lies can only be to
create fear and loathing, which is useful for political power.
Copyright © 2004 K.C.Wilson.
K.C. Wilson is the author of Co-parenting for
Everyone, Male Nurturing, Delusions of Violence,
and The Multiple Scandals of Child Support, all
available as e-books
at http://harbpress.com.
