Love, honour and obey: Institutional ideologies and the struggle for battered women

Abstract

"Love, honour and obey", the phrase is now often deleted from the marriage vows, but still stands as confirmation of the fact that the woman enters into the state of marriage in a secondary, subservient position. This omission may reflect the current concern about the position of women in marriage and society, but it does not reflect a change in the reality of married life. The omission is a bow to the trendy new cause called 'women', but it is a superficial, cosmetic patch which has been placed upon the institution of marriage. An institution which has been blemished for centuries by a patriarchal structure and a hierarchal ideology which has institutionalized the subservience of one half of the population and deified and enshrined that relationship to such an extent that it is almost beyond question or scrutiny. "Love, honour and obey" is the lot of women in marriage. Care for him, look up to him and do as he wishes - or else. Implied in that vow is the threat of rightful control over those who fail to obey; control may take the form of coercion. Thus, foundations of wife battering are written into the marriage contract. The church as well as the state are complicitous in this. The struggle for battered women is not just a struggle for women who are beaten by their husbands or a struggle against the men who beat their wives, it is a struggle against the structure and ideologies which support wife beating and the oppression of women in marriage. These ideologies have developed over a long period of time and have become an accepted part of every social institution. They serve as an implicit support system for wife beating and have become so much a part of the culture that it took hundreds of years before wife beating was undovered and defined as a social problem about which something should be done. In a small community in England in 1971 a group of women and a cow began a struggle which was eventually to lead to the "discovery" of the problem of battered women[l]. In less than three years, it was to be