Before modern times, people “faced few possibilities when it came to marriage,” notes The Doomslayer:
The number of potential partners in one’s tiny village was low, and the few available choices might all be one’s cousins, increasing the risk of birth defects in any resulting children. Peasants “married fellow villagers and were so insular that local dialects were often incomprehensible to men living only a few miles away”….Given the highly limited pool of marriage partner choices, many people settled for spouses ill-suited to them and much of the satirical literature of the 18th century lampooned marriage as a hell or prison sentence for one or both partners. The poem Wedlock by the Englishwoman Mehetabel “Hetty” Wright (1697–1750), herself pressured into a loveless marriage with a plumber, paints a typical picture: “Thou source of discord, pain and care, / Thou sure forerunner of despair, / Thou scorpion with a double face, / Thou lawful plague of human race, / Thou bane of freedom, ease and mirth.”….
In The Spirit of English Wit, a man’s wife hangs herself on an apple tree. A neighbor then asks the man for a scion of that tree, to graft it upon a tree in his own orchard, in hopes that the neighbor’s own wife will hang herself upon it.
Moreover,
Courts tolerated physical abuse in most cases, and men often had the legal authority to commit their wives to insane asylums. Domestic violence was celebrated in songs such as the upbeat wife-beater’s anthem The Cooper of Fife…Women, for their part, were also known to engage in criminal cruelty toward their husbands, such as by lethally poisoning them…Aqua Tofana was a poison discovered in 17th-century Sicily that was notoriously sold through much of Italy by women to other women seeking to discreetly end their husbands’ lives. Hundreds of victims (mainly men murdered by their wives) are estimated to have perished from the colorless, odorless poison, the precise ingredients of which are today unknown.
