Reparations And The Historical Hierarchy Of Suffering
The United Nations declares the enslavement of Africans is the "gravest" crime against humanity and seeks reparations. What about the historical suffering of women?
It seems the world has forgotten the suffering of our female forebearers.
The United Nations recently created a hierarchy of atrocities in which it ranked the transatlantic slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity.”
Forgotten apparently are the practice of throwing female babies off a cliff due to a preference for sons (China), throwing widows on their husbands’ funeral pyre (South Asia), female genital mutilation (Africa), and executing women as witches because they threatened the male social order (New England).
Also forgotten are the centuries of legally classifying women (like slaves) as chattel to deny them rights to their children, to own property, or to be free from violence.
(This may be hard to believe but many older women can remember when women were denied entry to medical and law schools due to quotas, unable to get a credit card in their own name, and were blamed for sexual assault because they sipped a beer and and wore a v-neck sweater.)
Domestic Violence
I researched the legal history of women when I wrote an introduction to a three-volume series on domestic violence, Domestic Violence: From a Private Matter to a Federal Offense.
I wrote about the 1849 case of Susannah Palmer, an English charwoman who was married to a drunken thief. He threw her into the streets one night to make room in their bed for another woman. The next morning, he blackened her eyes and knocked out five of her front teeth. After a number of such incidents, she fled with their children. He pursued them, took her meager earnings, and sold her furniture. Police said nothing could be done because he had not deserted her.
The common law in England — and America — then held that husbands could beat their wives with a stick that was no bigger than their thumb.
One night, Susannah was cutting bread for the children’s supper, and he began to beat her. He was cut slightly by the knife blade when she raised her hands to protect herself. She was arrested, convicted of unlawful wounding, and sent to Newgate prison.
What’s the point of comparing violence against African Americans and women? There is none. So why is the UN insistent upon doing so?
Fast forward 150 years. There were some laws in place to protect wives but they were not enforced.
Tracey Thurman, a Torrington, CT, homemaker, notified police of repeated threats on her life by her estranged husband, Charles J. Thurman, Jr., a short-order cook at a local diner frequented by police. Police did nothing.
