Column | Did JD Vance say women should stay in abusive marriages? (2024)

Is the claim true? Did Vance say that? “Suggest” is a vague word that can cover anything from an assertion to an implication to a wink. It’s worth unpacking exactly what comments on the subject Vance has, or hasn’t, made.

Let’s get some context:

Every “JD defends domestic violence” claim I’ve seen has linked back to remarks he made in 2021 at a Christian high school in Southern California. Speaking on the evolution of no-fault divorce, Vance told the audience: “This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that, like, ‘Well, okay, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.’” He went on to speculate that, “maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages.”

The even violent clause is the one that perked listeners’ ears. Certainly, couples of all political persuasions have decided to gut out unsatisfying marriages for the sake of the children. But encouraging spouses to remain in a union that is dangerous rather than merely disappointing is where reasonable people draw the line.

Let’s get some more context:

It’s both surprising and not surprising that Vance might have a confused perspective on healthy marriages. The entire point of his 2016 bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy” is that he was raised in a dysfunctional family. His grandparents’ relationship is affectionately euphemized as “chaotic,” but the anecdotes he recounts are downright scary. He describes how his mother and aunt used to play a game as children of watching their father come home from work and park his car in the driveway. If he parked normally, all was well. But if the car was askew, it meant he was drunk, and the night would be bad: “Sometimes they’d run out the backdoor and stay with Mamaw’s friends.”

As for his grandmother, Vance writes that after one “particularly violent night,” Mamaw warned her husband that she would kill him if he came home drunk again. A week later when he did, she poured gasoline over his sleeping body and lit a match. He escaped with minor burns.

Vance portrays his grandparents as equally at fault for their volatile relationship (“Mamaw,” he writes, “devoted herself to making his drunken life a living hell.”) The scenarios he describes, though, don’t sound to me like an ornery woman giving as good as she got. They sound more like a desperate woman trying to stop the violence perpetuated by her alcoholic spouse, by whatever means she can think of. Are her strategies good ones? Absolutely not. A better strategy might have been for her to leave the man, but Vance seems to think that would have been wrong. “They never got divorced,” he approvingly told the high school audience in 2021. “They were together to the end, till death do us part.”

His grandparents aren’t the only example of domestic violence in “Hillbilly Elegy.” Vance writes that his sister, Lindsay, describes seeing their biological father “push Mom aggressively.” But, he says, his father denied physical abuse. “I suspect that they were physically abusive to each other the way that Mom and most of her men were,” Vance eventually adjudicates: “a bit of pushing, some plate-throwing, but nothing more.”

In addition to the eyebrow-raising assertion that “a bit of pushing” is no big deal, I’ll note something else: As with Mamaw and Papaw, Vance seems to view his parents’ alleged domestic violence as a both-sides problem. So what if Lindsay says she saw their dad push their mom? he seems to be asking. Their mom probably pushed him, too. That’s not true assault, that’s just … passion? Messiness? Hillbilly-ing?

However he would define it, Vance seems to differentiate between this familial behavior — you come home drunk, I light you on fire — and what he views as more serious infractions. He writes that his aunt Lori ended up in an “abusive marriage,” and rather than suggest she should have stayed in it, he praises Mamaw and Papaw for helping her escape.

Vance has repeatedly said that his 2021 remarks were taken out of context. “I have seen siblings, wives, daughters, and myself abused by men,” he told Vice in 2022. “It’s disgusting for you to argue that I was defending those men.”

And so I wonder whether some of the distance between what Vance thought he was describing and what liberal listeners heard is due to a discrepancy that Vance himself perceives between “actual” abuse — in his mind, the horrid kind that might send a woman like Aunt Lori rightfully fleeing from her husband — and mere “chaos” — in his mind, the kind where both men and women end up being violent, but honoring marital vows is the goal that should supersede all others.

Vance didn’t say he was talking about violent men, he says he was talking about violent marriages. He doesn’t say that women should stay behind, he said that couples should stay together — that till-death-to-us-part should bind us all. It sounds more like he was advocating for equal-opportunity misery, bizarre and misguided as that might be.

I’m not saying this is logic that any sentient person should accept, and I had to break my brain a little to get there. But if I’m trying to imagine Vance’s brain, I don’t think he thinks that women, specifically, should stay in marriages in which they are brutalized.

Now. Let’s have even more context.

The fact of the matter is that domestic violence disproportionately affects women. In the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, researchers found that 32.5 percent of women and 24.6 percent of men were victims of “severe physical violence” from a partner in their lifetime. The subcategories provide a more sobering gap. While about the same proportion of women and men (18.9 percent vs. 16.9 percent) report being “hit by a fist or something hard,” three times more women than men report being threatened with a gun. Three times more women than men report being beaten. Four times more women than men report being choked or suffocated. Twenty times more women than men report being raped. And, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, women are five times more likely than men to be killed by an intimate partner.

So, when Vance says that people should be more willing to stay in “even violent” marriages, he is de facto saying that women should be willing to stay, simply because women are the ones who more often experience the violence. Statistically, it’s not a both-sides issue, it’s a much-more-often-this-side issue.

The other fact of the matter is that divorces are overwhelmingly — 70 percent of the time, according to a 2017 Stanford study — instigated by women. The researcher who conducted the study didn’t know why this was the case, since breakups between nonmarried heterosexual couples are evenly instigated. He speculated that “marriage as an institution has been a little bit slow to catch up with expectations for gender equality.” He wondered whether married women might, in part, just get tired of being expected to do the bulk of the housework and child care.

So, again, when Vance says that people shouldn’t divorce just because they’re unhappy, he’s de facto speaking to women. Because women are the ones who are unhappy enough to want to leave.

Add to this the fact that ending no-fault divorce has become a pet project of certain right-wing figures and that many women hear it as a dog whistle for supporting misogyny. See, for example, podcaster Steven Crowder, who became vocal on the subject when his own wife left him. Later, alleged footage leaked of Crowder berating his then-pregnant wife, yelling at her for failing to “respect men” and behave in a sufficiently “wifely” way.

Add into it the fact that the Republican Party has been busily working to curtail women’s rights on multiple fronts: abortion, access to birth control, etc.

When listeners heard and reacted to Vance’s comments, that is the context they were bringing into it. Even violent is not a concept that exists in a vacuum. It’s a concept that exists in the context of all in which you live and what came before you. Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?

Back to our original question: Did Vance say that women should stay in violent marriages?

The short answer is that he didn’t.

The longer answer is that he did, in the sense that women represent one-half of the heterosexual couples that he was jointly sentencing to misery.

The even longer answer is that it’s complicated, and requires more of a knowledge of statistics and sociology than Vance might have had on hand at the moment he made those comments — although, frankly, how much knowledge do you need to have to understand that intimate partner violence is a major issue for women? An aspiring senator, as Vance was at the time, should know that.

The final answer is that if I were him, I would address the matter head-on now. I would explain in detail exactly whatever it was that I was trying to say. I sense that his answer (He just meant pushing was okay, not hitting? He has categories of acceptable violence?) would be ... uh ... illuminating.

Anyway. If I were Vance, would clarify what I said. And then I would apologize for what I implied.