violence, intimacy, and community in fin-de-siècle Paris
- Categories
- Book/Boek
- Creator
- Ferguson, Eliza Earle
- Publish Year
- 2010
- Shelfmark
- FR 1D 2010
- Thesaurus
- sociale klasse, geweld, huiselijk geweld, rechtspraak, seksualiteit, dagelijks leven, gender, familierelaties, 19e eeuw, Frankrijk
- Description
- The author researched domestic violence among the working class in France and uncoverd intimate details of daily life and the complex workings of court proceedings in fin-de-siècle Paris. She looked at hundreds of court records to understand why so many perpetrators of violent crime were acquitted. She finds that court verdicts depended on community standards for violence between couples. Her search uncovers testimony from witnesses, defendants, and victims documenting the conflicts and connections among men and women who struggled to balance love, desire, and economic need in their relationships. The analysis of these cases also reconstructs the social, cultural, and legal conditions in which they took place.The ethnographic approach offers insight into the daily lives of nineteenth-century Parisians, revealing how they chose their partners, what they fought about, and what drove them to violence. In their battles over money and sex, couples were in effect testing and enforcing gender roles.