'I Don't Know Whether to Kiss You or Spank You': A Half Century of Fear of an Unspanked Woman : "They all express the same idea: the “best wives and noblest mothers are, after all, but grown up children.” This statement comes not from a movie but a Long Island judge making his declaration validating wife spanking in 1902. The victims’ childishness repeatedly comes up in these proceedings. In justifying spanking his wife in 1958, a Santa Monica psychiatrist said, “Well, what can you do with a child?”
Many of these men treating their wives like children were, quite simply, married to children. Teenage wives as young as 13 reported being spanked. In 1908, a New York husband spanked his 16-year-old wife for standing on the street talking to some “strange men.”
“They were not strange men,” she asserted in court. “They were schoolboy friends.”"
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