We always read or hear about how men used to put their wives over their knees for a spanking, but did you know that it was also quite common for wives to spank their husbands a hundred years ago? It sounds almost funny and indeed the subject was treated with quite a bit of humor back in the day.
While we don’t condone any form of spousal abuse here at Strange Ago, we do find some of these old accounts of wives spanking husbands to be a bit odd when compared to today’s society.
300 Pound Husband Spanked by Little Wife
Strange news from out of Colorado Springs hit the papers in the fall of 1921. Apparently, a 300 pound husband liked to punch his 125 pound wife and had, on occasion, knocked her out. One day she had enough and somehow managed to put her large husband over her knee for a spanking. The man was so humiliated from the treatment that he immediately filed for a divorce. [1]
Lay Off the Hard Cider
Mrs. Frederickson of Georgetown, Connecticut, 1912, was a large, well built woman whose strength and height towered over her much smaller husband. Unfortunately for all, her husband liked to drink his hard cider and would often return home rather drunk. The lady of the house soon took matters into her own hands and began spanking her husband whenever he came home drunk. Eventually the man’s friends found out and, after egging the man on over hard cider, the drunken husband went to the local judge and filed a complaint against his wife. She was arrested and let go on a $500 bond with a warning not to mistreat her husband any further. [2]
A Cure for Smoking and Laziness
In a New York City newspaper, 1922, spanking husbands was touted as a cure for husbands who smoked and were lazy. One woman wrote:
“The letter you published recently about the drug fiend who was cured by his wife punishing him came as an inspiration to me. For six months my husband has been hanging around the house and doing nothing but smoking cigarettes and drinking bootleg whiskey whenever he had the price.
“After reading this letter, I decided to take the law into my own hands and see if it would do any good. That night I laid him across my knee and gave him a good old fashioned spanking with a hair brush. The very next day he went out early and found a job that afternoon. That night he came home and sat down and starting to smoke cigarettes, one after the other.
“I told him to stop it and he refused, so I gave him another spanking with the hair brush, this time so he could not sit down. He has not smoked any more cigarettes. The results have been so good that I would recommend this treatment to all women who are afflicted this way, as it will make men out of their husbands.” [3]
Court Instructed Spanking
While judges were once quick to rule that husbands had a right to spank their wives, there were also judges who instructed wives to spank their husbands. That was the case in Detroit, 1923.
“Joseph, thirty-one years old, will behave for the next year if spanking and the continual presence in his home of a probation officer have the proper effect. Mrs. Gladys, his wife, proved to Judge Thomas M. Cotter yesterday that she was capable of spanking him – had been doing it for a long time – and was instructed by the court to administer the punishment whenever she believed it necessary. She then was made a special probation officer for one year to see that her husband came home at a reasonable hour, avoided bad company, and conducted himself as a dutiful husband should.” [4]
