Perhaps it was historically justified that way, but is it really "better perceived" that way? I'd argue that it's better perceived as a policy of subjugating women's interests to men's.

There were also legal immunities from tort liability and for less serious physical assaults. Indeed, there was historically a privilege for a husband to use force reasonably necessary to "discipline" a wife similar to the privilege to do so under current law for parents and children. This still exists in some countries.

@bdb484 In context, I think it is clear that "better perceived" is intended to mean, "the historical justification would be more accurately understood to have been", rather than "better" in some normative sense.

In context -- including the follow-up comment -- I don't think that's clear at all. But the normative debate does seem like it's probably irrelevant for purposes of answering the question.

Women might have been de jure protected, but frankly de facto were typically not. Why is it difficult to see the old laws as merely a power structure that benefitted men?

@TigerGuy, I'm not convinced the de facto protections were lower than the de jure ones, or that it was a society primarily organised around the exploitation of women by men, or that marriage generally is characterised by coercion and conflict between the partners.

@Steve men in the US beat their wives with impunity until relatively recently.

@TigerGuy, and yet in modern times the US has never recognised any legal right for men to hit their wives. I see no reason to believe that ideas in the past were any different to today, which is that couples' relationships are very difficult to judge from the outside and can involve workings that are largely unseen outside the relationship.

@steve, again, de facto, it wasn't really illegal, and men really didn't care. The protections were clearly lower, there isn't an honest debate possible on this topic. You can posit there were good reasons (there wasn't), but clearly domestic abuse wasn't an issue until about the 1960s.

@TigerGuy, I can't quite parse all your shorthand, but it's completely false to say it wasn't an issue - the existence of a violent minority has always been an issue for as far back as records go, and so has other kinds of particularly male excess like drunkenness.

@Steve: Indeed, the perception of drunkenness as a male vice (and one that enabled domestic violence) was why the 1800's Temperance movement, and then Prohibition activism, was dominated by women.

@bdb484 I think Steve might have rather meant that it would be more accurately perceived to have been historically intended, and perhaps also historically effected, as… such a policy. IMHO your argument would be a highly ideologically loaded affair of opinion, not a useful to a historical discussion. I read Steve’s closing comment as a summing up of his answer’s portrayal and offered view of the historical regime. Not as employing the word better in the sense of a value judgment.

Yes @ohwilleke but I understand that those existed in context of a broader and arguably fairly coherent regime that included the balancing feature of husbands bearing liability for their wives’ conduct. In judeo biblical law for example, fathers would bear punishments for their minor children’s crimes. Therefore they had not only an incentive but also a presumed responsibility to discipline them. Was this but also the situation into Victorian or Georgian times in the west with respect to married women with coverture?

@TigerGuy why is it necessary to assume that a fashionable view of the old laws is correct and not merely part of a power structure itself that benefits no one but global empires?

@TigerGuy You’ve yet to provide evidence for your proposition. This resembles the old equally unsubstantiated-and-unfalsifiable tropes of “did you know that 90% of rapes don’t even get reported?” How can such a statistic even be calculated, at all, much less reliably?

@Seekinganswers The right to discipline a spouse was not meaningfully tied to a husband's responsibility for his wife's legal liabilities. The bigger issues were discipline to force the wife to do household chores (which were much more onerous before modern technology), to impose obedience, and to punish a spouse for disrespect. Tort liability was far less of a concern and contractual liability for necessities was basically an agency theory. The husband would not have criminal liability for a spouse's acts. The exact timing is beyond the scope of a comment.

@TigerGuy, the distinction you make between "defacto" and "dejure" is exactly the basis of my argument that the law at any given time does not necessarily correspond to the actual protections enjoyed. But you are tending, I think, to argue that the defacto protections are always much less than the dejure rules. I disagree. I argue that under the common law historically, the courts were simply not seen as the appropriate place for regulating marital relationships and low-level discord there. (1/2)

The theory that husbands could attack their wives without legal penalty is probably true if it didn't cause serious physical injury, but such husbands would not only risk retaliation from the wife (including her offering violence in return), but any kind of habitual or unjust violence would attract the intervention of the community in other ways, because the lord of the manor or the circuit judge is not the only person capable of such intervention, and violence has never been the standard in marriages (even if the majority reluctantly tolerated some amount of it amongst a minority). (2/2)

@Steve would you please let me have your email address? I have so many questions I’d like to ask you which would probably be off topic on stack. One of them which should hopefully be more tolerable is, have you ever come across the writings of Francesco Alarico della Scala?

@Seekinganswers, I'd rather not publish my email openly, but I'm happy to get in touch if you have some details?

I can't say I'd heard of him, but a quick glance at some articles seemed interesting.