Uxoricide: The Word You Don't Know Because You're Not Supposed To

On the Language We Don't Have for Men Who Kill Their Wives.

It’s 6:56 am, ET. Welcome to this morning’s Golden Hour.

It’s been a heavy, heavy week. Personally, I’m still in the stages of navigating loss and grief, while also watching back-to-back high-profile stories about men destroying the lives of the women and children around them. It’s been jarring to grieve my father, who was gentle and encouraging, while reading stories of men who destroyed their entire families, aka family annihilators.

Last week, I wrote about Dr. Cerina Fairfax and Coral Springs Vice Mayor Nancy Metayer, both of whom were killed by the men they married. I took some inspiration from Nancy Metayer’s family, who removed "Bowen" from her last name in her memorials and in editorial coverage. (Bowen is the last name of the man who killed her.)

Vice Mayor Nancy Metayer. She was killed by Stephen Bowen, the man she was married to.

I made the argument that men who kill their wives shouldn’t be called husbands anymore. After all, if vows say, “til death do we part”, essentially haven’t the men chosen to end their marriages in the most cruel and permanent way possible?

Of course, I got some pushback from men on social media, arguing that I was just playing semantics, and “married to at the time” was just a long-winded way of saying husband. Or that as a journalist, I would be hiding facts if I didn’t call the man “husband”. Why is this word so important to people?

After all, what is more concrete and factual than the ending of a marriage via death?

A woman can have multiple husbands in one lifetime. She can only have one killer.

Language matters, and I care about it very much. Which led me to my next question…

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Language, violence, and women

I took Latin in school, leaving me with a lifelong interest in etymology. I have seen a number of accounts and writers explicitly use the term femicide, and specifically Black femicide— in the aftermath of the murder of Dr. Fairfax and Nancy Metayer.

As my readers and social media commenters and I went back and forth over how to describe men who kill their wives without using the word “husband”, I couldn’t help but feel a language gap.

Of course most people know suicide (to kill oneself) and homicide- (to kill another human). I realized we don’t have easily accessible language for the specific act of a man who kills his wife.

A quick Latin vocabulary lesson:

Patricide- killing of one’s father

Matricide- killing of one’s mother

Filicide- killing of one’s biological children

Fratricide- killing of one’s sibling (although technically, sororicide would be the killing of a sister)

The killing of a wife— the technical term is uxoricide.

First time hearing uxoricide? Yeah, me too. And I wonder why. What does it mean that we don’t use this— or any— specific term that immediately signifies the specific act of killing one’s wife? We know from the data that vastly more men kill their wives than wives kill their husbands. What do we lose by flattening the killing of wives into “domestic violence” or “intimate partner violence”— as if the violence is equally distributed among the genders in heterosexual marriages?

Children killing their own parents is shocking, and for the most part, parents killing their own children engenders shock and disgust. These killings go against the natural order of things.

But men killing their wives? All too common. So unspecial that it doesn’t deserve a separate crime category in a patriarchal system. Fatherhood, motherhood—- these are the most valued in such a system— but men’s lives, feelings, mental health, careers, matter most of all.

The central lie of the patriarchy is the delusion that men are women’s protectors and providers. If this were true, then uxoricide should be a crime that strips men of all social privileges and status.

But the fact that we don’t even have specific language for the crime of killing one’s wife just goes to show how devalued women are in a patriarchal system.

I’m not naive enough to think that if we all just improved our vocabulary, men would stop putting bullets in their wives. But language gaps can be damning diagnostic tools. Indeed, how can we solve a problem we refuse to give a specific name to?

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Domestic Violence and DEI

Just days after the Fairfax murder, 31-year-old Shamar Elkins took a gun and killed seven of his own children and one of their cousins in Shreveport, Louisiana. The children ranged in age from 3 to 11. He also shot his wife in the face and the mother of one of the children. They both managed to survive. Elkins would end up being killed by police after a car chase. The New York Times reported that at one point during an argument, the mother of his kids threatened to leave him. Elkins reportedly told her, “I’ll kill you, my kids, and myself.”

Beyond being a domestic violence incident, this is classified as a mass shooting event. But already, it feels like America has shrugged this shocking incident off. After Sandy Hook, Uvalde, and other mass shootings of children, does this country even get riled up about men gunning down kids anymore? Seems not.

We know that guns and male violence are a leading cause of death for women, children, and pregnant women. And as I have written numerous times, Black women are more likely to face violence not only from the men in their lives, but also from the health care systems while birthing children from the men in their lives. The dark irony of this timing is that the Trump administration reminded us that they consider anything related to helping Black women to live is illegal DEI, and is subject to being targeted for cuts from this administration.

A viral exchange this week between Rep. Summer Lee and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. underscored this. During a hearing, she confronted RFK Jr. over removing the word “black.” “Do you have an idea on how to solve the maternal mortality crisis if we can’t say the word Black?” Rep Lee asked. RFK responded with some gobbledygook about ending division.

Again, what do we do when our male-dominated government refuses to help keep vulnerable women, and especially Black women— alive?

We, women, have no choice but to put the dots together. In a piece called “Men Are Scary,” Dr Stacey Patton writes:

I have been sitting in conversation after conversation with women who are talking about the Justin Fairfax murder-suicide, the recent murders of a dozen more Black women since January, the CNN “rape academy” investigation, and now the horrific murder of eight children in Shreveport. These women are saying something that is deeply unsettling: Men are scary.

These women are not just tired, but scared in a way that sits deep in the body. They are saying, without hesitation, that they don’t want to date or marry. They don’t want to risk building a life with someone who could turn into a threat. They are choosing solitude not because they’ve given up on love, but because they are trying to stay alive inside their own lives because “men are scary.”

Men kill us when we are with them. They kill us when we try to leave them. We are more likely to be killed by them when pregnant. The language to name the specific violence doesn’t exist, and our own government refuses to care about our deaths.

Indeed, perhaps female solitude is our best form of self-defense.