For a very, very, long time it was considered proper to hit your family, as the man of the house, to keep everyone in order. If the patriarch was hitting you, you needed discipline, this was a god ordained arraignment, so what were you doing against god to deserve this wrath? Domestic violence was crazy high compared to today, as late as the 1990’s. Also drinking rates have fallen greatly, especially since the 18th century.

Being a woman in these romanticized times meant you couldn’t have any sort of credit, you couldn’t hold a bank account, you couldn’t vote, violence towards you, from your family was not criminal. Until the 1900s women couldn’t legally own, or rent, property, except under specific conditions (inheritance, gift from their husband, tenement housing built specifically to house women alone, that sort of thing). Even though it was legalized int he early 1900s, it was also legal to discriminate against women, in that way, until the 1970s, in a lot of places. It was far more common for men to drink, and for men to beat their families, and they had few, to no, legal ways to create independence from their husband. So they were stuck there.