"The Rule of Thumb."  This expression explained exactly how thick a stick husbands could use to beat their wives. This law was passed during t he reign of Romulus in Rome, approximately 753 B.C.  It took to 202 B.C. before women had the right to sue their husbands for "unjustified" beatings. However, the rights were through out by the Church around 300 A.D., and Constantine the Great had his wife burned alive when she was of no more use to him.  The Church continued to vacillate between support of wife abuse and encouraging husbands to be more compassionate.

For the next 1500 years laws and customs swung between protection for women and a man's total right to control and manage his family as he saw fit. In England during the early 1800s, laws protecting animals from abuse gradually began to be used to curtain child abuse, then spousal abuse that had gone to the extreme of "endangering a woman's life."

In the United Sates, in 1871, Alabama was the first state to rescind the legal right of men to beat their wives, followed quickly by Massachusetts, and in 1890 by North Carolina.

In 1924, France overturned the Napoleonic Code, which said in part:  "Women, like walnut trees, should be beaten every day."

It took the worldwide women's rights movement in the 1960s and '70s, which claimed that what goes on in the privacy of homes is society's business, to allow domestic violence issues to be brought out into public discussion. Hotlines, shelters, and education programs were set in place in the US and many countries. 

There was good news during that time.  In Minnesota in 1977, the first state funding bill for domestic violence, in the amount of $50,000, was passed.  It was awarded to the Consortium of Battered Women for community education.  And then there were laws, such as one still on that books in that year in Pennsylvania stating that no husband shall beat his wife after 10 PM, or on Sunday, that were repealed.

Helpmate was formed during this era when a group of volunteers, seeing the seriousness and prevalence of this problem, began working to change the public perception of domestic violence, and to provide help for its victims.

For more information:  www.helpmateonline.org.