According to the historian Estelle B. Freedman, women in the United States in the 1920s evolved beyond the traditional roles of matriarch and nurturer thanks to the right to vote and a new-found independence. Additional freedoms and liberties provided these women with the opportunity to enjoy life outside of home. The media wrote of scandalous “new women” and “flappers,” who defied social conventions. In the Baltimore Sun column below, writer Martha Lee scoffed at men’s clubs that were forming to struggle against women finding new freedoms in life: “They protest against: smoking among women, women who wear flopping galoshes, the intrusion of women into realms heretofore restricted to men. The last phase covers a multitude of what men call sins and women call worthy aspirations.”
Even though change was in the air, women were still not free to stray outside the confines of the traditional nuclear family model. And there certainly wasn’t the same pace of change occurring in major cities and rural areas. Snyder County residents might have felt the breeze of social change, but that didn’t mean their world was going to blow over. Although several laws passed at the state level during this period protected women from domestic violence, arrest rates for “wife-beating” remained low. In the countryside, and among working-class familes, women’s new-found independence was superficial at best. Many husbands still expected women to behave a certain way, and they were in no frame of mind to encourage women’s ability to hold down a job or create a life of interest for herself.
After a short burst of trials in the 1910s, arrests for wife-beating dwindled locally, and press reports of wife-beating seem not have been prosecuted. It’s hard to know if fewer women experienced abuse in the late 1910s and early 1920s, or if there was just less public display of those who were. Local social custom held that women owed it to their husbands to remain hard-working and docile. A tacit social acceptance of husbands’ authority may have led women to believe that local law enforcement wouldn’t help them if they tried to report abuse. Scholars have found that in situations where officials have a higher social or economic status, they are less likely to assist victims—namely women—who try to have their abusers arrested.
Even in cases where the police were willing to get involved, abused women during the 1920s remained reluctant to prosecute their husbands. They worried about jeopardizing the family income or caring for their children as single mothers. While they surely wanted an end to their abuse, many saw no legal way to escape their situations.
Newspaper accounts from 1924 pointed to Annie’s reluctance to go to the authorities. Harvey had previously killed a man and been released from jail, seemingly with few consequences. Despite his death threats, Annie likely thought it was useless to take matters to the police. Instead, she went to Ralph Shadel.
The last image here is a newspaper clipping that reveals that Harvey had beaten Annie so badly in the past that she had been bedridden for three days. Both Annie’s neighbor and her doctor knew how the injuries had been inflicted, yet no action was taken against Harvey. Incidents like this one likely added to Annie’s feeling of helplessness and desperation.