Scholarly research suggests that wife beating can be traced to the emergence of monogamous relationships and patriarchal social systems in which women and children were regarded as the property of their husbands (Committee against Domestic Abuse, 1). Women could be burned at the stake for refusing intercourse with their husbands or for having miscarriages. The church and the state in Europe during the Middle Ages and beyond authorized men to chastise wives physically for any disobedience. The French Code of Chivalry, for example, specified that a husband of a scolding wife could "knock her to the earth, strike her in the face with his fist, and break her nose so she would always be blemished and ashamed" (Committee Against Domestic Abuse, 1).
Only gradually has domestic abuse and wife battering become a crime and it is even more recently that the government has taken steps in the United States in general and in Minnesota in particular to intervene in cases of wife battering and to provide shelters and other services to victims of this crime (Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless, 1).
In 1967, one of the first shelters for battered women was opened in Maine, but it was not until 1972 that a group known as Women's Advocates located in Minneapolis/St. Paul opened a one bedroom shelter, expanding by purchasing a house in 1974. The Women's Advocates was among the first groups in the U.S. to develop from a women's consciousness raising group, building a collective rather than hierarchical service model that offered legal services as well as emergency shelter services for victims of domestic abuse (Committee Against Domestic Abuse, 2).
The advocacy movement for battered women resulted in the establishment in Minnesota of independent, nonprofit, residential shelters; safe houses; and similar programs that used hotels and motels, provided refuge and other services to any woman who was assaulted by her partner or other male...