Wife Beaters
As the most-repeated-as-gospel origin story goes, a Detroit man was arrested in 1947 for beating his wife to death. Newspapers across the country printed a photo of James Hartford, Jr. wearing a stained and dirty sleeveless undershirt. The caption below the photo was labeled “The wife-beater.” The newspaper was referring to the man pictured being led away by the police, but many readers were said to have taken the caption to mean the sleeveless undershirt. Hartford’s shirt was reported by some as being bloody, torn, and covered in baked bean stains.
A less popular yet tenacious origin story from the Middle Ages says wife beater comes from stories about waif beaters, de-armored knights stripped down to their chain mail undershirts. Snopes.com says both these origin stories were made up in 2005 by a satirical blog writer named Paul Davidson and that Davidson later confessed his fictions.
This article in the February 20, 1880 New York Times may be the first mention of wife beater in print
A WIFE-BEATER ARRESTED, said the headline. “William Y. Bowden, a truckman residing at No. 318 West 17th Street, who is said by the Police to be an incorrigible wife-beater, was brought before Justice Otterbourg in the Jefferson Market Police Court yesterday for stabbing and beating his wife Elizabeth Bowden. The complainant is a weak, sickly-looking woman and the defendant is a tall burly man. He has been arrested several times for beating his wife, and was discharged from the Work-house but a few days ago, where he had been sent for an assault on his wife.*”
These days, the New York Times says the term and the shirt are some sort of fashion voodoo that tries to tap into an imagined working-class virility with the idea that men become dangerous and attractive when they wear sleeveless white undershirts. No mention is made of how many rips or stains are enough to be considered sartorially stylish.
Things in the past are often very different than they are now, most in ways we don’t understand
The same can be said for most of history. In 1930s and 1940s Hollywood films, men hitting women was a common theme. Respected actresses spoke lines inviting male companions to hit them because they deserved it. This Neanderthal thinking was likely a product of the casting couch era, when self-indulgent Hollywood producers and directors groped female employees with the impunity of kings.
Speaking of Neanderthals, who’s not familiar with this stereotype?
Hollywood film makers frequently wardrobed brutal, loutish, lower-class characters in sleeveless white undershirts
This costuming allowed men to show off their physiques and project the sense of menace that made many female moviegoers’ hearts flutter. If you’ve seen Streetcar Named Desire, you might recall scenes where Stanley Kowalski, wearing a dirty white sleeveless t-shirt, was played by a 27-year-old Marlon Brando as a crude and vulgar Stone Age woman-hater.
For many years after, people associated men who wore wife-beater shirts with thuggish behaviors and violent tendencies
It’s no coincidence that New Jersey mobsters Tony Soprano, Silvio Dante, Paulie Walnuts, and the gang wore wife beaters. Only later did pop culture adopt the sleeveless white undershirt as appropriate wear for sex symbols such as Paul Newman, Warren Beatty, Freddy Mercury, Tupac Shapur, and many other males.
Three-fourths of 12- to 17-year-olds in the US say that TikTok has helped them learn about how to organize and protest on behalf of social justice
TikTok, the home of modern social protests, took up the banner of stamping out the use of wife beaters as a term referring to the sleeveless T-shirts favored by men who like to display their guns and tats.
Members of copycat generations say the words wife beater normalize contempt for women and violence toward them
A self-appointed special interest group has decreed that henceforth, wife beaters are to be referred to as wife pleasers, thus solving what the well-meaning little dears think is a social problem worthy of their attention and action.
This strikes me as particularly awkward in that the real wife beaters are violent males harming women and no one is calling them wife pleasers
The wife pleaser club, none of whom are known to subscribe to LetsTakeACloserLook, seem to be missing the point by focusing on name of a shirt instead of on the real problem. Why wouldn’t millions of TikTokkers want to make a real contribution by investing their energy in stopping domestic abusers, the real wife beaters?
What should everyone under 18 know about domestic abuse and violence?
- Domestic is defined as related to family relations or the home environment.
- Abuse is treating someone else with cruelty, especially repeatedly.
- Violence is the use of physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill another person
For those truly interested in helping abused women, internalize these facts first
Psychology Today says 95% of reported domestic violence cases are of males abusing females. More often than not, the females are the same ages as millions of Gen Zers and TikTok fans.
- One of every ten women in the U.S. will be raped by an intimate partner at least once in her life.
- More than half of all college students say they don’t know what to do to when a victim of abuse needs help, including themselves. Don’t be one of them. Start by reading 8 Ways to Help a Victim of Domestic Violence.
- One study funded by Unicef.org found that children who were exposed to violence in the home were 15 times more likely to be physically and/or sexually assaulted than the national average.
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* Recidivism is committing new offenses after being punished for a crime
- More than three times out of four, female victims of intimate partner violence had previously been victimized by that same male offender.
- More than half of those arrested for domestic violence are arrested again for the same thing. The most common reason given to police officers is that the wife refused to submit to the husband’s wishes. Others include She deserved it, I was having a bad day, and I was just joking.
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month
Go to the website Office on Women’s Health, a U.S. Department of Health & Human Services site to find the resources and programs near you that provide support for women who have experienced violence and abuse.
Bonus
In 1950s television, men would become enraged to the point that they threatened to hit their wives for comic effect. Click here for a 30-second video clip of Honeymooner Ralph Cramden’s go-to phrase, “To the moon, Alice,” which always got the biggest laugh of the show from the live studio audience.
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David is a researcher, writer, and teacher who looks at old things in new ways, sees the commonplace in greater detail, and explains complex subject matter in simple, conversational language. More than 400 of his free articles are posted on this site.
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