This research paper was posted (and later removed) on r/Male_Studies and contained a wholely inaccurate summary about the history of domestic violence legislation both inside and outside the United States.

The title is "Female Perpetrators of Domestic Violence" by Keith Bell, and it was published in 2019 in The Encyclopedia of Women and Crime.

This publication is not peer-reviewed, but few would know that at first glance. They do have editors though and I think it's a shame that this type of misinformation gets published in places that should otherwise contain credible information.

The paper has a few issues but most notably it contains this summary:

Historically women, under the common law [sic], were viewed as property of the men they married and the use of force by a husband against a wife was considered to be lawful. While noticeable efforts were pursued to change this stereotypical belief of females throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, domestic violence failed to gain the attention of lawmakers in the United States until the 1970s. As a one-sided display of ownership of women as property for nearly two hundred years, domestic violence was initially viewed as a male-perpetrated crime, fueled by a male-dominated patriarchal society, in which females were viewed as submissive and often the only victims of violence.

Ignoring the other myth that common law "treated women like property", it's simply not true that domestic violence (at least against women) was ignored by US lawmakers until the 1970s.

Violence against women was criminalized in US colonies when they were first founded in the new world. Indeed these laws existed under common law itself, and were carried over with the colonists from Britain. And the US government even passed laws in the 1920s at a federal level, well before the 1970s, despite those laws being largely redundant due to state level laws having already existed for hundreds of years at that point.

You can see here where several New England states still had rather barbaric, medieval style punishments for wife beaters still in practice well into the 20th century:

https://www.mdhistory.org/only-the-instrument-of-the-law-baltimores-whipping-post/

In 1856, Putnam’s Monthly Magazine published the following summary of relations between men and women in America, basically pointing out that wife beating was illegal, but husband beating was both legal and commonplace in America:

The old and reasonable maxim that ‘he who dances must pay the piper,’ does not apply to wives—they dance, and the husband pays. To such an extent is this carried, that if the wife beats her husband, and he, having no authority to punish her in kind, applies to the criminal courts for redress, she will be fined for assault and battery, which fine he must pay, even thought she has plenty of money of her own. Or, in default of paying, go to jail! Such cases are by no means of unprecedented occurrence in our criminal courts.

https://gynocentrism.com/2015/12/19/a-word-for-mens-rights-1856/

In the 1970s, the US government commissioned the world's first study about family violence which found, much to people's surprise, that women were abusing men at higher rates than the reverse.

Dr. Murray Straus was one of the researchers on that study and later became one of the world's foremost experts on the topic, up until his death in 2016. Which is something you would think they would mention if they're bringing up the US's attention to this in the 1970s.

I don't know if this summary is purposefully dishonest or if the author actually just didn't do any background research before writing it. But this kind of historical revisionism and whitewashing needs to be addressed and called out when and where we see it in order for the full picture to be shown. It is in fact part of the reason violence against men isn't taken seriously. And it is absolutely reprehensible that something like this could get published in this day and age.