I have just finished reading the second of Elena Ferrante’s four-part series on Neapolitan life in the 1950s and 60s. I take the series to be semi-autobiographical. In Naples, it seems, violence against wives was endemic; and—of her time—it goes with little comment from Ferrante.
In the early 1970s, Erin Pizzey made us realise—those that did not already—that domestic violence was endemic in our society too. Her ‘battered wives home’ in Chelsea was described by Lord Denning MR in Davis v Johnson [1979] AC 264, [1978] 1 All ER 1132 (in the Court of Appeal at [270]): ‘“Battered wives” is a telling phrase. It was invented to call the attention of the public to an evil. Few were aware of it. It arose when a woman suffered serious or repeated physical injury a from the man [sic] with whom she lived. She might be a wife properly married to her husband: or she might only be a “common law wife.”’
