Doing his best to sustain the sanctity of marriage.

Freeman's paper deals with marital rape, a specific form of marital violence which has been virtually ignored in the literature on violence against women. Battering and rape, the author argues, are closely related and frequently occur together. Both forms of violence stem from a patriarchal society designed to protect the interests of men and maintain male dominance. At present men who rape their wives are immune from prosecution in England. This is also the case in most other countries, but the paper also considers what has happened in places where the immunity has been removed or modified. Freeman traces the history of the immunity in England and casts doubt on its legal foundation and on the contemporary arguments used in its defence. The immunity rests on two shaky foundations: that married women are part of their husbands' property and that man and wife are one flesh. The first of these ideas may still have some currency, but it is as out-moded as the immunity itself. The author considers various modifications that could be made to the exclusion rule but concludes that abolition is the only satisfactory solution. Women made a fuss about it in books, but in the cool judgement of right thinking men, of other men of the world, such as he recollected often received praise in the Divorce Court, he had but done his best to sustain the sanctity of marriage, to prevent her from abandoning her duty . … No, he did not regret it.