In a preliminary discussion of some of the more salient aspects of wife abuse, one of the harshest manifestations of a husband's real or perceived proprietary rights, this paper specifies the circumscribed legal options available to battered wives and how married women have struggled to articulate and assert their ambiguously defined right not to be abused or beaten by their husbands. The paper also provides an alternative perspective on the qualitative nature of marital relations by focusing not only on the hierarchical relations of domination and subordination within the family unit, but also on some of the potential sources of tensions and antagonisms between husbands and wives. The author advises that the ambiguous definitions of the law and the practices of the courts left unquestioned the underlying unequal distribution of power and privilege that structured relations between husbands and wives. Instances of wife abuse revealed how economic vulnerability, together with the often ineffective yet prevalent mediatory efforts of the legal system, left unchallenged the sexual hierarchy that continued to undergird and define the marital unit. 74 notes