Janice Schroeder, Carleton University
Vol. 23, No. 2 (Fall 2004), 261-281
This article juxtaposes a text from 1831 with a text from 1878 to explore two moments in the history of evidence of violence against women in the nineteenth century: the first, the sole instance of testimony in English yet discovered that was written in the words of a West Indian slave woman; the second, the most exhaustive and definitive study of domestic violence to date, which resulted in significant changes in protective legislation for married women. The essay examines how definitions and representations of evidence of physical pain shifted in the humanitarian narrative of this century by arguing that humanitarian narratives were not inherently transformative but rather complicit with forms of power that privileged certain members of the social body at the expense of others.
