SOURCE: "From Pedestal to Ditch: Violence Against Women in Shakespeare's Othello," in The Aching Hearth: Family Violence in Life and Literature, edited by Sara Munson Deats and Lagretta Tallent Lenker, Plenum Press, 1991, pp. 79-93.

In the following essay, Deats argues that the play Othello legitimizes violence and the "negative stereotyping of women, " both of which "underlie the phenomenon of wife battering. "

Today, most civilized persons would label wife battering an unspeakable crime, a crime that supposedly does not occur in educated middle-class or upperclass families. Yet until the nineteenth century, wife beating was authorized, even advocated by society, and even today, according to psychologist Terry Davidson, 50% of contemporary marriages are marred by some form of wife beating. A Harris poll taken in the 1970s concluded that physical violence against spouses occurs with equal frequency in all income groups, and this violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated against women (1978, 3, 6).

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