Reading the current thread with a title something like Violence or Abuse to Women immediately made me think of THE WEE COOPER O' FIFE, and DEVILISH MARY, and their ilk. But then I realized they were out of place in that thread, because it's a predominantly serious thread that deals with the abusive behavior, where those two songs, among others, deal with the wife's character and behavior.

There's a lot of "bad wife" songs in the folk arena, usually funny for some reason. "Bad husband" songs, on the other hand, are NOT funny, by and large. In fact, I can't think of any "bad husband" songs that are funny. Why is that? There are two reasons that come to my mind:

1. In our historical culture, the wife is "supposed" to be relatively weak and subservient, while the husband is "supposed" to be strong and the master of his household. The "bad wife" is seen as an upsetter of nature, showing the husband to be foolish or weak, unable to control her "as he should". Lots of room for comedy there.
2. The "bad husband", on the other hand, is bad because he's a drunkard, or a gambler wasting the household's resources, or a wife-beater, or a womanizer. None of those is likely to be funny.

Besides the well-known songs listed above, a good example of the bad wife song is THE MAN WHO WROTE THE HOME SWEET HOME NEVER WAS A MARRIED MAN.

Surely there's a lot more that could be listed.

Dave Oesterreich

[Many song titles in this thread have been converted to links by a Mudelf.]