In the 1970s, feminists attempted to create a false etymology for the phrase "rule of thumb". It was claimed that husbands used to be able to beat their wives so long as they used a stick or a whip no thicker than their thumb.

This is of course not true, and the real etymology for the phrase comes from a practice of using the length or width of your thumb as a unit of measure.

You'd be surprised just how many people believe this to be true though. The idea that men could legally beat their wives is a cornerstone of feminist dogma that they've tried to push for decades. The evidence for this practice, however, is basically non-existent. There are a couple court cases from the 1800s where men have seemingly gotten away with hitting their wives, but it has never actually been a legal practice under US law or under English common law.

And even those court cases that some feminists try to cite seem fairly lackluster. In one such case, the husband was found innocent due to a lack of bruising or marks on his wife. Which feminists try to interpret as, "it was fine so long as you didn't beat your wife too severely". Even if such a husband did get away with hitting his wife, clearly it was still a crime since it was prosecuted. And the reason he was found innocent came down to a lack of evidence, not because there was a misogynistic loophole that he took advantage of.

Other court cases ruled on interpretations of English common law, which is taken to help legitimize the idea that some form of wife abuse used to be legal. However, those court rulings consistently found insufficient legal evidence to justify an exception, including for cases of "mild discipline of your wife". Which if anything seems like evidence against this, not in favor of it.

Domestic violence wasn't explicitly outlawed in the US at a federal level until the early 1900s, which is another talking point you see about this. But it was still illegal at the state level going back to the 1600s. And would have also been illegal under regular assault laws. This is because there weren't any legal exceptions granted to husbands to assault their wives the way feminists like to say there were.

Even more damning is that wife abuse (but not husband abuse) carried with it very cruel and unusual punishments throughout most of history. Under one law, a husband accused of beating his wife would be buried with just his head left above the ground so that his wife could do whatever she wanted to him in retribution.

In fact it was actually husband abuse, not wife abuse, that used to be legal in history. Under some laws, a wife was not only allowed to beat her husband, but if she did, it was used as evidence that the husband had actually done something wrong and needed to be punished even more. The assumption is that he had to have done something to piss her off bad enough to hit him. And him making her mad, but not her hitting him out of anger, was deemed to be a crime. Under some versions of this law, the punishment for making your wife angry enough to hit you included being drug throughout town by horses.

The expectation, both socially and legally, was that husbands were supposed to be subservient to their wives, not the other way around.

So not only is this feminist view lacking in evidence, but the very opposite of it seems to have been true.

Here is a source I've been using for this for a while:

The "Great Taboo" and the Role of Patriarchy in Husband and Wife Abuse

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1855/f217b082603d0ab37ea80c4741fceb8a4a23.pdf

Full text:

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+%22great+taboo%22+and+the+role+of+patriarchy+in+husband+and+wife+abuse-a0165430144

Not only does it go into the background of this controversy, the authors analyzed a bunch of papers that claim that wife abuse used to be legal to show that their citation trails basically go nowhere. The only legitimate primary source is something written in the 1700s by Sir William Blackstone, an English judge. He claimed that someone told him that you could use moderate discipline on your wife at some distant point in the past, but even he couldn't find a reference to it in older law books. He then went on to say that such a thing would be obviously illegal in modern times (meaning in 1700s England). Thus apparently refuting the claim in the very source that is commonly cited as evidence for it. Modern historians have of course found no evidence for this, either.

Like a lot of things you come across in the context of gender and gender equality, I was expecting this to be fairly unknown outside of the men's community. Obviously there are academic references but just because you have sources doesn't mean it's widely known about.

On a whim I decided to check out Wikipedia, just to see how this was handled there. And I was surprised to find that not only was this mentioned as a myth, but the article itself went into a good bit of detail over the history of this revisionist claim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thumb

Clearly there's been a bit of "debate" that's played out on this page, given the length of discussion that's afforded to this just in the intro section (where it goes back and forth with a few feminist talking points sprinkled in here or there). But ultimately the facts have prevailed.

What I found interesting is just how much time, energy, and money feminists have put into making this seem like a legitimate fact. To quote Wikipedia,

In the 20th century, public concern with the problem of domestic violence declined at first, and then re-emerged along with the resurgent feminist movement in the 1970s.[3] The first recorded link between wife-beating and the phrase rule of thumb appeared in 1976, in a report on domestic violence by women's-rights advocate Del Martin:

For instance, the common-law doctrine had been modified to allow the husband 'the right to whip his wife, provided that he used a switch no bigger than his thumb'—a rule of thumb, so to speak.[5]

While Martin appears to have meant the phrase rule of thumb only as a figure of speech, some feminist writers treated it as a literal reference to an earlier law.[5][19] The following year, a book on battered women stated:

One of the reasons nineteenth century British wives were dealt with so harshly by their husbands and by their legal system was the 'rule of thumb'. Included in the British Common Law was a section regulating wifebeating [...] The new law stipulated that the reasonable instrument be only 'a rod not thicker than his thumb.' In other words, wifebeating was legal.[20]

Despite this erroneous reading of the common law (which is a set of judicial principles rather than a written law with individual sections) the spurious legal doctrine of the "rule of thumb" was soon mentioned in a number of law journals.[3][7] The myth was repeated in a 1982 report by the United States Commission on Civil Rights on domestic abuse titled "Under the Rule of Thumb", as well as a later United States Senate report on the Violence Against Women Act.[3]

In the late 20th century, some efforts were made to discourage the phrase rule of thumb,[7] which was seen as taboo owing to this false origin.[3] Patricia T. O'Conner, former editor of the New York Times Book Review, described it as "one of the most persistent myths of political correctness".[5] During the 1990s, several authors wrote about the false etymology of rule of thumb, including the conservative social critic Christina Hoff Sommers,[3] who described its origin in a misunderstanding of Blackstone's commentary.[12] Nonetheless, the myth persisted in some legal sources into the early 2000s.[3]

There are other myths floating around out there as well. For example it is often said that you could beat your wife on certain days of the week or in certain locations (commonly the courthouse steps on Sunday).

Despite being widely repeated and endorsed by feminists, as near as I can tell, that one is a myth also:

https://www.thisismysouth.com/11-unusual-outdated-southern-laws/

So why make these efforts to rewrite history?

And what does it say about your ideology that you have to make things up to help legitimatize it?

This isn't the only area that feminists have engaged in historical revisionism. Other examples include the nature of coverture under English common law (a type of marriage), the treatment of women as literal slaves to men, and of course the history of the movement itself. "First wave feminism" and "second wave feminism" weren't actually older incarcerations of feminism. Most of those people didn't call themselves feminists and they definitely wouldn't have agreed with modern feminist ideology. Despite this, a great deal of time and effort has been made to appropriate their accomplishments under the banner of feminism.

The good news is that a lot more attention has been given to this recently. Sources are easier to come by and there have even been a couple books written by impartial historians about this (including at least one book, The Privileged Sex, where the author went in to it under the assumption that women were oppressed, and was surprised to find just how incorrect of a view that is).

Facts can't be hidden forever. You can try to rewrite history all you want, but people are going to find the truth when they go looking for it.