Historicizing the Emotional Experiences of Family Violence

Abstract: Feminist historians have documented women's agency in combating family violence and traced shifting attitudes toward domestic abuse in various historical contexts. Building on this scholarship, this article advances a history-of-emotions approach, suggesting that the concepts of emotional formation and emotional echoes allow us to historicize experiences of family violence. Focusing on Denmark from the 1960s through the 1980s, we analyze divorce cases involving family violence to identify how the victims—overwhelmingly women—communicated their experiences in their interactions with public bureaucracy. The prevailing conceptions of violence in society and law, we argue, were central to the emotional formation of their experiences. Women experienced an emotional frontier, struggling to convey their experiences, often unsure of whether a certain practice, such as threats, sexual pressure, or humiliation, was indeed abuse. Yet, by seeking to articulate their experiences as intolerable, they contributed to a broader societal reconceptualization of family violence.