Content warning: this blog post contains description of domestic abuse and sexual violence. Please read with care – information on where to find support is listed at the end of this blog.
We went out for quite a while, a year, two years. Course I thought there was nobody like him, but the minute the ring was on the finger it all changed.
For teenage girls in Scotland the 1960s were anything but swinging. The 1970s punk era largely failed to deliver a revolution in dating habits; by the time young women were settling down with their boyfriends in the 1980s they would have been forgiven for thinking they had entered a Victorian time-warp – light years from Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmo dream of women ‘having it all’. In my oral history interviews with women born from the 1940s – 1960s and professionals working in public agencies in the late twentieth century, I examined the roots and realities of domestic abuse in post-war Scotland. I tracked women’s experiences across four decades. They revealed how abuse sneaked in while couples were dating to emerge fully formed as soon as soon as they were married or moved in together. In the process, and as late as the 1980s, formerly ardent suitors shape-shifted into domestic tyrants. How did the hippie, biker, muso, student and loads-a-money guys of late twentieth century Scotland turn into old fashioned patriarchs as soon as they got the girl of their dreams?
Scotland’s Swinging 60s?
Even by the 1970s, the so-called sexual revolution, free love, the Women’s Liberation Movement, the oral contraceptive ‘pill’ and the Abortion Act of 1967 had not begun fully to trickle down to ordinary teenagers growing up in the not-so-swinging Scotland of the 1960s and 1970s. The availability of the oral contraceptive pill was not widespread at this time and there was still a stigma for single girls attending special clinics for prescriptions. Young women’s ‘respectability’ remained closely tied to public perceptions of their chastity; being unmarried and on the pill was a socially risky business. The sexual revolution was a winner for men: although it raised their expectations of young women’s sexual availability, it was at odds with the women’s willingness to respond.
All men were interested in in the sixties was sex and at that point I was terrified you know, I’d never met anybody that liked just me so I was a bit confused.
The double standard for women was clear. Throughout this period, women described their fear of the social stigma arising from public knowledge of their sexual behaviour and/or pregnancy outside of marriage and the few choices they had if things went wrong.
I’m getting a’ these flowers and I’m getting a’ these gifts… I think I was just blind. I got pregnant and I couldn’t tell my Mum and Dad so that was me. Make my bed and lie in it. I got married in 1981 and he said to me – I thought it was a joke – “That’s you bought and paid for.” That was my marriage license.
Having sex carried a strong sense of lifelong commitment for young women and of ownership for young men – women’s monogamy (not men’s) remained central to heterosexual relations whether couples were dating, cohabiting or married.
I remember thinking, ‘I’m no’ gonnae be able to be wi’ anybody else after that, I mean I’ve had sex wi’ this guy that means that him and I are gonnae be thegither for ever’ and that was gonnae be it.
By the 1980s it seemed that having sex whilst dating still permitted a young man to believe he could claim ownership of his girlfriend with marriage and children being regarded as the next natural step.
In the 70s, if you werenae married before you were twenty you were on the shelf. There was no other expectation for ye. All my pals were married and had babies…sixteen, seventeen, eighteen they were having babies you know ‘cos that was the expectation.
Ardent suitors or budding tyrants?
Long standing conventions of patriarchal marriage with traditional, highly gendered roles and responsibilities began to shape the women’s experiences of dating and began taking root in their relationships. Hearts and flowers soon gave way to a grimmer reality.
As children, women and men had been socialised into their future gender roles, these roles continued to evolve as they started dating. Very quickly, women observed the emergence of highly differentiated habits and practices, and the growing dominance of the men’s viewpoint, opinions and behaviour.
We moved in together and after about three months things started to look not quite right – it deteriorated from then on. Once, when I tried to say what I wanted to watch on television, he threw me on the bed and punched into my back.
The dawning reality of domestic abuse
Domestic abuse was experienced as a gradual and highly gendered process of entrapment whereby men’s flattery, courtship and romantic gestures flipped to increasingly violent, coercive and controlling behaviour when the couple married or moved in together. Women’s early experiences of domestic abuse and sexual violence were closely linked to the establishment of male dominance and an encroaching atmosphere of fear in the relationship. Women slowly learned to defer to the men under duress as threatening and demeaning language, looks and gestures became the norm:
You know that way you just get the look and that’s it… shit you know. So by that time obviously I knew what the look was. … I remember this vividly and so that was it. Your stomach was just churning and you were just terrified really.
The silent treatment was a common tactic lasting days and even weeks with physical assaults and rape not infrequent. The narratives illustrated the intimate workings of domestic abuse and sexual violence early in women’s relationships: the violence enforced patriarchal gender roles, gradually reducing the women’s capacity for resistance and severely limiting their freedom to control many aspects of their lives.
The women described the profound impact the nature and consequences of domestic abuse began to have on their sense of themselves,
I was looking for why it was my fault ‘cos I wisnae a good wife and I wisnae this and I wisnae that and I didn’t know what I wisnae da’en right…
They also reflected on how the dynamics of their relationships shifted and the way abuse changed them as it became a fact of life.
The physical violence, I don’t know how long it lasted but it tailed off because I learned how to play the game.
Rationalising domestic abuse
Women struggled to rationalise the abuse in a number of ways: by privileging their partners’ point of view over their own, acknowledging the men’s problems in early life and recognising the financial pressures on men.
I always sort of, bowed to his hard life, which was his excuse for being a shite basically you know.
The women were deeply confused and frightened by the men’s capricious, illogical and abusive behaviour and were often blamed for the abuse they experienced.
I could never understand it because I was always the good woman. I was always a good child, I was always biddable, I have a compliant nature. I was always compliant…
Struggling for answers, they accepted the blame and the shame as they learned to live with the everyday reality of abuse.
Refracting Scottish manliness
Working with convicted domestic abuse perpetrators in the late 1980s, one former criminal justice social worker observed that men were most concerned about their own and others’ perceptions of their manliness.
Manliness is something that men can never have enough of because it degrades. You constantly have to top up your manliness and keep proving how manly you are – so men are constantly comparing themselves to other men.
Publicly, manliness was evident in the jobs men did, their social and leisure pursuits and in their public personae. Manliness was also closely bound up with being the family provider a role woven into the post-war British welfare state, in the way national insurance, benefits and pensions were calculated. Women quickly learned that the risk of being assaulted or abused could increase if they did anything which their partner perceived as undermining them and became acutely aware of the men’s contrasting public and private faces.
He was a quiet man and everybody used tae say “that’s a great man you’ve got”, “quiet man”, “wouldnae dae any herm…”
The men were described as having distinctively different public and private faces.
He was very plausible… very sociable… everybody really liked him, thought he was good fun, great cook, great host.
He could be, well they all can can’t they, could be really charming and great father and all this sort of thing… Yeah but he was a nightmare, an absolute nightmare.
This duality extended to what went on inside and out with the home, with the longstanding patriarchal convention of family privacy and non-interference by others persisting into the late twentieth century. Abusive men could count on women not disclosing the abuse to others and women understood that they shouldn’t for fear of reprisals. ‘Manliness’ was also linked to power in intimate relationships with women.
Men have seldom advertised the ways in which authority over women has sustained their sense of themselves as men. As a general rule, those aspects of masculinity which bear most directly on the upholding of that power are least likely to be made explicit.[i]
The narratives clearly showed that women’s monogamy, men’s exclusive rights of access to women’s bodies, time and labour were central to what counted as ‘manliness’. Men used domestic abuse to enforce their customary entitlements and sustain their sense of themselves as men and to keep women tied to their traditional subservient role. Conventions of family and relationship privacy provided cover for domestic abuse from the early days of their relationships and women very quickly learned to endure in silence and confusion for fear of breaching age old conventions. Old habits were showing little signs of dying. By the 1990s, women were still making their beds and having to lie in them.
This is the third in a series of essays being posted in spring 2021 to accompany a webinar series hosted by Scottish Women’s Aid during April and May 2021. Forthcoming essay titles in the series:
- From battered women to coercive control – women’s changing experiences of domestic abuse in post-war Scotland.
- Police, criminal justice and social work responses to domestic abuse in post-war Scotland.
- Getting free – the impact of domestic abuse and leaving an abusive relationship in the 1960s-1990s
Dr Anni Donaldson
Twitter: @AnniDonaldson
Website: www.glasgowanni.com
[i] Tosh, J. (1994, January). What should historians do with masculinity? Reflections on nineteenth-century Britain. In History Workshop (No. 38, pp. 179-202). Oxford University Press.
If you feel scared of your partner or ex-partner, or if you are worried about someone you know, get in touch with Scotland’s 24-hour Domestic Abuse and Forced Marriage Helpline on 0800 027 1234 for support and information. You can also email and web chat from www.sdafmh.org.uk. There are translation and interpreting services available.
