The "rule of thumb," however, turns out to be an excellent example of what may be called a feminist fiction. It is not to be found in William Blackstone's treatise on English common law. On the contrary, British law since the 1700s and our American laws predating the Revolution prohibit wife beating, though there have been periods and places in which the prohibition was only indifferently enforced.
In conditions of severe hardship, like famine or war, women and men struggle together for survival; in periods of tight control, men exclude women. Women can use their talents only marginally in times that have margins.
Unlike most radical women, working class women have no freedom of alternatives, no chance of achieving some slight degree of individual liberation.