Margaret punished her children by beating them.

Just before her third year as a student, she was raped by a man she met at a party. She wrote years later, I really felt as if somebody had made me eat shit. Though later accounts of this event vary, it seems that the male friends who had brought her to the party had no idea of the gravity of the offence, and thought her unreasonable to want to go home at once. Later they held an unofficial trial of the perpetrator (whom they all knew) and told him they would kill him if they caught him in some of his habitual hunting-grounds.

From EG 's somewhat cryptic account, her husband's career after leaving Cambridge was problematic and even violent. She writes that he suffered eight severall sinister assaults which made her fear for his life. It is not clear whether these are human attacks of some kind, or visitations of disease.

RH was sexually abused by her step-father. Una Troubridge excised a section of her biography of Hall which described this abuse: I have deleted the sexual incident with the egregious Visetti lest we have psycho-analytic know-alls saying [RH ] would have been a wife and mother but for the experience.

Brilliana, Lady Harley , wrote to her son that she was actually under siege at Brampton Bryan Castle: the gentillmen of this cuntry have affected theair desires in bringing an army against me.

After the auction BH attempted to hold a public meeting, but police who were present allowed the meeting to be broken up by three or four hundred stone-throwing schoolchildren. Harraden suffered injury to one of her eyes when mud was flung in it.

According to Harriet Hosmer , who was also staying with them at the time, she awoke from a nap to see Miss H. attacking Miss C. with her fists and Miss C. defending herself. Their disagreement apparently erupted because Hays, suspecting Cushman of infidelity, asked to see a note that she had been writing. According to Hosmer, instead of complying, Miss C. coolly put the note into her mouth! Then the H. woman beside herself with rage, swore she'd make C. swallow it. . . . Miss H. pursued her from the salon into the dining room and chairs and tables, and clothing and C. flew about together. Hosmer maintains that the two women fought like two gladiators and when she attempted to intervene, MH , the Victorious Amazon, threatened her.

At this point Héloïse's uncle Fulbert, supposing Abelard to have dissolved the marriage, had him ambushed and castrated.

After the French defeated the Hanoverian army in August 1757, Hanover was occupied by French troops. Life in the city did not return to normal until after the end of the Seven Years War.

Elizabeth Coltman (later EH ) was a teenager when in 1785 her family's house in Leicester was attacked by a mob of Luddites or machine-breakers. While doors and windows were broken and the house plundered, the family fled, and stayed away for two weeks. Her father signed an agreement banning machines from within a twenty-mile radius of Leicester; he was able to continue his business very successfully at nearby Bromsgrove.

Although she had written permission from the king to buy land, and although she was at least sixty years old, EH was seized in Boston, stripped to the waist (despite the snow), tied to a cart, and whipped out of town three times or more for preaching. She was, she said later, ready to lay down her life, but she was rescued by Native Americans as she travelled on foot through the wolf-infested forests.

Her time in Connaught was, by her account, one of great personal danger to herself and other English inhabitants, and increasingly so in the 1860s as the Fenian movement gained ground and Gladstone 's Irish Church Act of 1869 fuelled resistance.

Crawfurd soon became physically and psychologically abusive. He once split the dress and ripped the coat off Hunt's back; during another argument he screamed, [y]ou don't know men. . . . You are a weak unenterprising woman like all women. They have no initiative; they ought not to have—it is not their métier. He often referred to her pejoratively as a virago; she described herself as a female rake.

According to EI 's friend John Taylor , Harris (who often made sexual advances towards his players) once attempted to rape her. She managed to escape after she grasped his hair and pulled with such violence that she forced him to desist. Had he been wearing a wig, she said later, she would not have got away.

According to Harriet's fictionalised story her owner hit her for the first time—a stunning blow—during a discussion about her black suitor.

NJ never forgot the terror and indignity of having her father pull down her drawers and hit her on the bare bottom during her childhood.

In 1702 EJ (who had already suffered a fine and imprisonment for her literary-political activities) had a physical confrontation with Titus Oates , famous for his informing or bearing of false witness against Catholics in the Popish Plot of August 1678. She publicly challenged his right to the clerical dress he was wearing (he had lied about possession of a university degree, and had been defrocked some years back); he struck her with his cane. A considerable fine was levied against him in court for this violence, but later much reduced in amount in consideration of his destitute state.

In her autobiography PDJ remembers the terror of giving birth during a bombing raid, which was of being separated from her baby (the babies were moved to the hospital basement at night) during the bombardment. My great fear was the hospital would indeed receive a direct hit and that in the confusion and carnage I would be unable to find my baby.

There they encountered violence and rioting. The land-agent of Mulranny had been attacked, and his son had killed the assailant in retaliation. HJ remained in the country during the inquest and trial of the land-agent's son. She declared the whole atmosphere of the place was depressing—the spirit of revenge was running riot and death was in the very air [they] breathed. A year later she depicted this kind of agrarian violence in The Priest's Blessing.

HCJ inherited from her mother at least the capacity for rage. Stevenson mentions as an example of her courage that when a maid of hers was seduced by a married servant in someone else's employ, she horsewhipped the man with her own hand.

Male students and other protesters gathered in front of University of EdinburghSurgeons' Hall in Edinburgh, in an effort to harass and intimidate SJB and the other female medical students.