Definition of "wifebeating"

That suggests that the wifebeatings in this nation are running into the many millions annually!

1981, Marlene Cummings, Greta Marshall, Governor's Violence Against Women Task Force

But creepily enough, from '30s delta bluesman Robert Johnson's beating-until-satisfied "Me and Devil Blues" to Jackie Gleason's 1954 "One Of These Days — Pow!" to Dion's face-slapping 1962 "Little Diane" to Lou Reed exclaiming "you better hit her" in "There She Goes Again" to the Intruders chasing girls and beating 'em up in their 1968 beach-soul hit "Cowboys to Girls" to the "wifebeating has been around for 10,000 years" headline fronting Guns N' Roses Lies, those in favor seem more prevalent.

1997, Chuck Eddy, The Accidental Evolution of Rock'n'roll, page 22

Though many states had laws by 1870 that prohibited wifebeating, the laws seem to have been enforced only weakly.

2013, Cheris Kramarae, Lana F. Rakow, The Revolution in Words, page 116

But the Clark-Darden experiment was better: mass-racist black-cheering of a wifebeating killer's release was an invaluable wakeup-shock to even the densest traditional civil-righteous Lib.

1994, Dio - Volumes 4-9, page 47

So I was in a world where all the men were wifebeating drunkards and I forgot.

2014, Ru Emerson, The Craft of Light

Thinly disguised as Windsor House, “the lone tower block at the end of Golborne Road”, it is where the darts-playing, wifebeating criminal Keith Talent lives in Martin Amis’s novel London Fields (1989).

2016 March 17, Tim Martin, “High-Rise hell: the doomed tower blocks that inspired Ben Wheatley's new film”, in The Telegraph