Who was the first king of Rome? Romulus?
Michel
http://chronicle.com/article/Domestic-Violence-a/47940/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Myths or Facts in Feminist Scholarship?
Christina Hoff Sommers, in her essay "Persistent Myths in Feminist
Scholarship" (The Chronicle Review, online edition, June 29),
criticized Nancy K.D. Lemon, a lecturer in domestic-violence law at
the University of California at Berkeley's School of Law, for
publishing errors in the popular textbook she edits, Domestic Violence
Law, and for not taking seriously her continuing criticisms of the
book. "One reason that feminist scholarship contains hard-to-kill
falsehoods is that reasonable, evidence-backed criticism is regarded
as a personal attack," Sommers charged. Following is Lemon's response
to those criticisms and Sommers's rebuttal. Sommers is a resident
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Nancy K.D. Lemon: Christina Hoff Sommers accused me of being a
"scholarly merchant of hype" for material in my popular textbook,
Domestic Violence Law. In fact, she is the one whose assertions are
untrue and who is impervious to correction.
I have worked in the domestic-violence field as an attorney since
1981, and pioneered teaching domestic-violence law. When I started
teaching this course in 1988 at the University of California at
Berkeley's School of Law, it was the first such course anywhere. I
created a reader, which was in such demand by other law teachers that
I contacted a publisher, and the book Domestic Violence Law was first
published in 1996. The third edition by Thomson/West has just come
out, along with an updated teacher's manual.
Sommers first contacted me by e-mail on February 21, 2009, and told me
she had been traveling around the United States criticizing me and my
textbook. The timing of her e-mail message was fortuitous, as I was
working on the final edits of the most recent edition. I double-
checked the specific points she expressed concern about and read the
sources she cited in her e-mail message. In my response to her, I
stated that while I had found some minor inaccuracies in the piece
about the origin of the "rule of thumb" and had corrected those, I had
confirmed the sources of the other supposed inaccuracies she
challenged.
In spite of my response, she wrote in The Chronicle Review that she is
"open to correction," yet she ignored my response to her and continued
to complain of the same purported inaccuracies.
In regard to the rule of thumb, for example, she asserted that Romulus
of Rome, who is credited in my book with being involved with the first
antidomestic-violence legislation, could not have done this as he was
merely a legendary, fictional character, who along with his brother
Remus was suckled by a wolf.
In fact, Plutarch and Livy each state that Romulus was the first king
of Rome. He reigned from 753-717 BC, and created both the Roman
Legions and the Roman Senate. He is also credited with adding large
amounts of territory and people to the dominion of Rome, including the
Sabine women. The modern scholar Andrea Carandini has written about
the historic reign of Romulus, based in part on the 1988 discovery of
the Murus Romuli on the north slope of the Palatine Hill in Rome.
R. Emerson Dobash and Russell P. Dobash, pioneers and well-respected
leaders in the field of domestic-violence research, discuss Romulus in
their 1979 book, Violence Against Wives. They state that the marriage
laws passed in 753 BC, under Romulus of Rome, allowed men to beat
their wives, and that this rule continued into England and the United
States in the 1700s and 1800s. Dobash and Dobash refer to a "rod drawn
through the wedding ring" in describing the size of the stick husbands
were allowed to use for this purpose, the same guideline referred to
as the rule of thumb.
Professor Henry Ansgar Kelly has also researched the history of the
term "rule of thumb," along with the historic right of husbands to
chastise their wives. In his article, "Rule of Thumb and the Folklaw
of the Husband's Stick," in the September 1994 issue of the Journal of
Legal Education, he cites Matthew Bacon, an 18th-century jurist, who
published a legal treatise in the United States and England in 1736
containing the comment that husbands had a legal right to beat their
wives. Similarly, Kelly cites Sir Francis Buller, an English judge,
who said in 1778 that it was acceptable for husbands to beat their
wives with a stick the size of their own thumb, though Kelly notes
that others disagreed with Butler that this was permissible. Kelly
also says that while canon law did not condone husbands beating their
wives, the ordinary gloss to civil law did allow this. The history he
reviews finds early jurists and legal treatises on both sides of
condoning actual wife-beating. However, Kelly cites numerous early
sources showing the right of husbands to "moderately chastise" their
wives.
There are several 19th-century American cases in which judges referred
to the rule of thumb, if not by name, then by reference to sticks or
switches and their relationship to the sizes of the husbands' fingers
or thumbs. These cases include Bradley v. State (Mississippi, 1824),
State v. Rhodes (North Carolina, 1867), Fulgham v. State (Alabama,
1871), and State v. Oliver (North Carolina, 1874).
According to John K. Wilson in the fall 1994 issue of Democratic
Culture, Elizabeth Cady Stanton also stated in her 1854 address to the
New York legislature, "By the common law of England, the spirit of
which has been but too faithfully incorporated into our statute law, a
husband has a right to whip his wife with a rod not larger than his
thumb, to shut her up in a room, and administer whatever moderate
chastisement he may deem necessary to insure obedience to his wishes,
and for her healthful moral development!" (quoting Stanton et al.,
History of Woman Suffrage, 1881).
Sommers has also stated that my textbook includes an article by Joan
Zorza referencing a March of Dimes study on domestic violence that
never took place. Sommers states that she contacted the director of
science education for the March of Dimes, and he denied that there was
any such study. Rather than asking me for a citation, she announced in
her lectures that the study did not exist and that my book was full of
made-up truths. Even when I told her I had seen a copy of the study as
provided by Zorza, Sommers went on to make the same assertion in her
piece in The Chronicle.
Apparently the March of Dimes employee was unaware of the research
this agency financed. The study Zorza sent me, "Battering During
Pregnancy: Intervention Strategies," by Anne Stewart Helton and
Frances Gobble Snodgrass, appears in the September 1987 issue of the
journal Birth. The article states at the bottom of the first page:
"This work was supported by a March of Dimes grant for the prevention
of battering during pregnancy." The study states that battered women
had twice the number of miscarriages than did nonbattered women.
Zorza also sent me a scanned copy of "Domestic Violence, a Women's
Health Issue," a 1994 report of the N.Y. State Senate Democratic Task
Force on Women's Issues, chaired by Senator Suzi Oppenheimer. That
report included a reference to the March of Dimes Protocol of Care for
Battered Women, which noted that battered women are twice as likely to
miscarry, four times as likely to have low-birth-weight babies, and 40
times as likely to have infants who die within the first year,
compared with nonbattered women.
Sommers also challenged a statement by Zorza in my textbook regarding
the high incidence of battered women in emergency rooms. Sommers says
she received a message from a statistician at the Centers for Disease
Control who stated that the incidence of females in emergency
departments because of domestic violence was 0.01 percent in 2005 and
0.02 percent in 2003.
Apparently that statistician has not read the Centers for Disease
Control Web site, which stated, when I checked it on July 15, 2009:
"IPV," or intimate-partner violence, "is a major cause of violence-
related injuries. Intimate partners were identified as the
perpetrators in 36 percent of all emergency department visits by women
who suffered from one or more violent injuries."
Similarly, the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of
Justice has reported that 37 percent of all women who sought care in
hospital emergency rooms for violence-related injuries were injured by
a current or former spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend (Michael R. Rand,
"Violence-Related Injuries Treated in Hospital Emergency Departments,"
1997).
We also find similarly high figures published in medical journals,
hardly bastions of radical feminism. D.C. Berios and D. Grady, in
their article "Domestic Violence: Risk Factors and Outcome," in the
August 1991 issue of Western Journal of Medicine, found that among 218
women presenting in a metropolitan emergency department with injuries
due to violence, 28 percent required hospital admission and 13 percent
required major medical treatment.
Doctors Evan Stark and Anne Flitcraft, prominent researchers in this
field, announced similar findings in their 1996 book Women at Risk:
Domestic Violence and Women's Health: "The initial conclusion of our
research was that more women sought medical treatment for injuries
resulting from domestic violence than for any other cause." ... Later
"studies continued to document substantially the same or higher
figures than we uncovered" (Sage Publications Page xvii).
The N.Y. State Senate report mentioned above cites the American
Medical Association's "Diagnostic and Treatment Guidelines," which
note that battered women account for 19 percent to 30 percent of
injured women seen in emergency departments.
Similarly, the study cited above backed by the March of Dimes contains
the following statement: "The magnitude of the problem is shown in a
Yale University study in which 21 percent of the 2,676 women treated
in the emergency department were battered." (See "Wife Abuse in the
Medical Setting," by Stark and Flitcraft et al., in Domestic Violence
Monograph Series No. 7, 1981.)
Sommers seems to have a history of making inaccurate assertions.
Ironically, one of the articles she cited in her e-mail message to me
in support of her assertions regarding the origin of the rule of thumb
was the Kelly piece. In fact, rather than supporting Sommers, Kelly
disagrees with her, stating: "The explanation she gives from a Women's
Studies Network communication by a folklorist, Philip Hiscock, that
[the term "rule of thumb"] comes from woodworking ... is supported by
no evidence."
Kelly is not the only researcher or scholar to find Sommers's
scholarship in error. In Women at Risk, Stark and Flitcraft note that
their research findings regarding the high numbers of battered women
in emergency departments were challenged in 1994 by none other than
Christina Hoff Sommers, even though she is a philosopher, not a
medical researcher, and thus had no basis for disputing their
findings.
Sommers seems to have made a career out of attacking other academics
and researchers and disagreeing with their findings, citing the same
assertions repeatedly over at least the last 15 years, even in the
face of evidence contradicting her claims. It seems I have the honor
of being her most recent target.
I have been teaching law students for 22 years and am the author of
one of the leading textbooks on domestic violence. It is important for
students to receive accurate information; good scholarship requires
nothing less.
Christina Hoff Sommers: Essentially everything in Professor Lemon's
response is wrong.
She confidently informs us that Romulus actually existed and ruled
Rome from 753-717 BC. That is preposterous. She cites Livy and
Plutarch as sources. These first-century writers did not claim to be
offering historically accurate accounts of events that took place some
700 years before their time, but openly professed to be summarizing
beliefs, myths, and legends that had come down through the ages. She
also cites the contemporary Roman archaeologist Andrea Carandini-a
maverick figure who discovered what he claims might have been a wall
of a palace that could have belonged to Romulus. As the July/August
2007 issue of Archaeology politely notes, his suggestion "represents a
sharp break with two millennia of scholarship."
Lemon's textbook teaches that King Romulus had a code of laws in which
wife beating was "accepted and condoned." That claim goes beyond
anything ever suggested by Livy, Plutarch, or Professor Carandini.
Where are her sources for these real-world enactments of a magistrate
whom nearly everyone regards as fictitious? She credits a 1979 book by
Rebecca and Russell Dobash, assuring us that they are "well-respected
leaders in the field of domestic-violence research." Which they may
well be-but if they had evidence that Romulus existed and information
about his code of laws, they would also be among the most renowned
classical historians of our time, which they are not. Why has this
honor eluded them? In their book on domestic violence, Dobash and
Dobash write, "Men who assault their wives are actually living up to
cultural prescriptions that are cherished in Western society." Perhaps
it is their political pronouncements that have rendered Lemon blind to
their scholarly limitations on matters historical.
According to Lemon's text, William Blackstone and other British common-
law jurists promulgated the "rule of thumb" law that gave a husband
the right to "beat his wife with a rod no thicker than his thumb."
False. Scholars have searched for this precedent in English law but
without success. Though a few 19th-century American southern judges
allude to it, no one has ever been able to find the actual law-neither
in Blackstone nor in any other source.
Lemon, in her response to my piece, cites the example of the 18th-
century British judge Francis Buller, who allegedly deployed the rule
of thumb in his courtroom. But UCLA scholar Henry Ansgar Kelly, who
has written the decisive exposé of the rule-of-thumb ruse, points out
that Buller did not refer to the law in any official ruling, but
mentioned it in an off-the-record remark. Buller was then mercilessly
pilloried in the London press and caricatured in cartoons as "Judge
Thumb." One Buller biographer denies that the judge ever made any such
remark, and no one can find any official record of his words or of any
case adjudicated by Buller that could have given rise to his comment.
But no matter, a legal legend was born. In Lemon's hands, the phantom
rule of thumb is presented as a fundamental precept in European and
American jurisprudence. Lemon has read Kelly's exposé. That the faux
law-complete with attributions to William Blackstone-is blandly
included in the latest edition of her textbook borders on academic
malfeasance.
Lemon stands by the claim in her book that "the March of Dimes found
that women battered during pregnancy have more than twice the rate of
miscarriages and give birth to more babies with more defects than
women who may suffer from any immunizable illness or disease." When I
read that passage to Richard P. Leavitt, director of science
information at the March of Dimes, he said, "That is a total error.
There is no such study." Now Lemon faults him for not being aware of a
study carried out by his own organization. How could its director of
science have been unaware of so important and dramatic a finding? Here
is how:
The March of Dimes never did any such study, nor did it commission any
such research. The source Lemon cites is a 1987 article in the nursing
journal Birth by two authors who were awarded a grant by the March of
Dimes to do a small study of battery during pregnancy and to summarize
strategies for prevention. In their introductory remarks describing
the scope of the problem, the authors refer to a 1981 monograph by
Evan Stark, Anne Flitcraft, et al., titled Domestic Violence. It makes
claims about the links between battery and miscarriages, and it was
not connected with the March of Dimes in any way. When students are
told in Lemon's book that "the March of Dimes found ...," they are led
to believe that this reputable organization carried out the major
study with the advertised finding. They do not assume that the finding
was by a third party, which was then referred to by someone who
received a grant from the March of Dimes to do a small study on a
different topic.
A few final words about Lemon's defense of the emergency-room factoid.
According to her textbook, "Between 20 and 35 percent of women seeking
medical care in emergency rooms in America are there because of
domestic violence." The number of women who annually seek emergency-
room care is approximately 40 million, so Lemon is saying that between
8 million and 14 million women are there because they suffered from
beatings by intimates. That is not even remotely true. The Centers for
Disease Control and Justice Department statistics she cites to
demonstrate her book's accuracy are not about the 40 million women who
visit emergency rooms, but rather about the approximately 550,000
women who come to emergency rooms "for violence-related injuries." Of
that group, approximately 35 percent were attacked by intimates. Far
less than 1 percent of the women seeking medical care in emergency
rooms are there because of domestic violence.
Lemon has just published the third edition of her celebrated, error-
ridden casebook. This time, as her response to my Review piece proudly
proclaims, she was well aware of my criticisms and brushed them aside
with disdain. Law students will now be treated to another round of
Elvis sightings parading as scholarship. As I said in my article, my
complaint with feminist research is not that authors make mistakes but
that the mistakes are impervious to reasoned criticism. They do not
get corrected, and the critic's motives are impugned. Nancy Lemon's
response to my article illustrates the problem perfectly.
Rich Alderson
founding of Rome accords very poorly with the archaeological record, and
that Romulus's exploits match well with other Indo-European deity figures,
I think that we can dispense with a search for a historical king of that
name.
--
Rich Alderson "You get what anybody gets. You get a lifetime."
ne...@alderson.users.panix.com --Death, of the Endless