Consider this chart:
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David Butterfield
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As you can see, since 1976 there’s been a marked decline in the number of men murdered by their wives in the United States and a smaller, but still significant, decrease in the number of women killed by their husbands. The graph comes from Sociological Images where Jay Livingston asks for suggestions that might explain this trend. He suggests that perhaps men are behaving better (not a popular theory, I’m going to guess) and that women have more options, citing the work of women’s shelters and the like in making it easier for women to escape abusive situations without murdering their spouse.
Matt Yglesias says, however, that what needs to be explained is the US’s previous ” unusually low level of gender inequality in intimate homicide”; Kevin Drum, on the other hand, suggests
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