The article discusses the connection between the notions of the gender order in the family that was dominant in the last two decades of the People’s Republic of Poland and the acceptance of violence. It also presents the potential of two types of sources of studying domestic violence in the 20th century: court files and the popular press. Such sources enable us to focus our attention equally on the discourse of the era and on the individual experience of historical actors, which can be read by deciphering the narrative strategies they use as they search for self-reflection concerning the situation in which they found themselves and ways of dealing with violence.