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Saturday, October 04, 2014

Comment: Matters of Privacy, by Margaret Talbot


From The New Yorker app

What was often used to justify this paradox was obeisance to marital privacy. In a North Carolina case from 1868, State v. A. B. Rhodes, the State Supreme Court declined to enforce charges against a man who whipped his wife "with a switch about the size of one of his fingers (but not as large as a man's thumb)." It did so not because it was upholding the husband's right to chastise his wife "but because the evil of publicity would be greater than the evil involved in the trifles complained of; and because they ought to be left to family government." 

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