Entre a casa e a delegacia: conflitos de casais, mulheres reativas e inquérito policial nos espaços da província de Buenos Aires (fim do século XIX - inicio do XX)

This article examines the interactions between police forces and local communities in the face of intimatepartner conflicts in which women reacted against male violence, in towns and cities across the province of Buenos Aires between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Five early instances of police inquiry are analysed, all involving women who were accused of violent offences. By pursuing acts of violence that extended beyond the privacy of the home, police commissioners and their assistants aimed to preserve the affective and neighbourly order of the community. Although police officers lived in close proximity to the communities they served, they displayed varying degrees of distance from the women involved and from their accounts of aggression, depending on occupational hierarchies, contact with local residents, and their willingness to listen to the accused women’s suffering. A gender perspective allows these distances to be examined within the conceptual framework developed by the field of the history of justice. The exceptional nature of these cases enriches the study of everyday violence, and identifying such clues enables the analysis of how conflicts were defined at a local social scale. While attempting to uphold order, the police also developed a degree of understanding toward the violence endured by women.