My Right Against Such an Unchristian Husband. Marital Violence and Women’s Legal Rights 1800-1940

Historically speaking, the existence of domestic violence in Icelandic homes has only recently been brought into the public discourse. The hidden violence found in the home was one of the major calls to arms for the women’s rights movements of the 1990s. They encouraged the public and the government to consider domestic violence, which is mostly directed against women, a societal problem rather than a private matter. In 2016, almost three decades later, an additional provision was added to the 1940 General Penal Code to specifically address violence within intimate relationships and provide additional protection to victims of domestic violence. As this article makes clear, this provision was not entirely new but rather a return to an equivalent clause found in the 1869 General Penal Code and its predecessor; the Danish-Norwegian laws written at the end of the seventeenth century during the reign of Christian V of Denmark. When the Danish laws came into force, medieval laws that stipulated a husband’s right to chastise his wife were repealed and new provisions introduced which secured the rights of both parties to charge their spouse for a violent act. The existence of the aforementioned legal provisions on domestic violence reflect the legislative view that such acts should not be tolerated and be punishable by law. Icelandic medieval law book Jónsbók contain no provisions that stipulate a husband’s right to chastise his wife. Such provisions are also not included in a 1746 domestic discipline decree which states that the master and mistress of the house have the right to inflict corporal punishment upon their children and servants. Temporary uncertainty regarding active laws and the general penal code’s vague phrasing of what constituted a husband’s unchristian or tyrannical treatment or abuse of his wife did not stop wives from bringing their husbands to court for domestic abuse. Regardless of the seriousness of the violence that the women were subjected to by their husbands, the courts in question resolutely took the women’s side, decreeing their husbands’ acts to be punishable by law. The wives in question had the full, legal right to charge their husbands with acts of violence in a court of law.