Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking.

• Author: Baker, Katharine K.
• Position: Review

Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking. By Elizabeth M. Schneider.(*) New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. 317. $29.95.

In Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking,(1) Elizabeth Schneider examines the legal treatment of battered women. It is a book rich in history, ideology, and challenge, which takes as its major goal the exploration of the relationship between the theory of feminist lawmaking and the practice of representing battered women. Schneider sees this relationship as a dialectic, with theory influencing practice and practice influencing theory, in order, she hopes, to arrive at a kind of synthesis that can better protect against the dangers of violence between intimates. In describing this dialectic, she explores feminist theories of rights, equality, and autonomy.

At the heart of Schneider's dialecticism is the now well-worn but still crucially important feminist understanding that the personal is political. As I read the book, the following hypothetical dialectical exchange kept repeating itself in my head. Says the very committed, well-motivated, earnest, feminist battered women's advocate to the woman who has been the victim of abuse: "We want you to understand that the reason that he beat you is because he has gender power. He wants control over you as a woman because he is a man. It feels personal to you, but it is really about gender politics." To which the equally earnest battered woman who, as is often the case, has suffered through years of horrific physical and emotional abuse and fear, responds: "And I want you to understand that what you are talking about is my life. It is my family, my community, my relationship. Who am I without these things? How are your politics going to help my life?"

The fact that this exchange seems to keep repeating itself in a variety of different contexts involving battered women says something rather pessimistic about the process of Schneider's dialectic. At this point, one would hope that the feminist political vision had incorporated more of the voice of battered women and that battered women would be more able to view their lives as at once personal and political. Schneider critically explores the tension between the personal and the political. She is at her best when doing so. Instead of reaching for synthesis, however, she seems to call for retrenchment back into the purely political. At the end of her introduction, she announces her conclusion succinctly: "I conclude with the need to reaffirm the original vision of violence and gender equality that animated activist and legal work...."(2)

After an explication, in Part I of this Review, of Schneider's comprehensive and sophisticated analysis of the issues surrounding battered women, I build on Schneider's analysis but draw a different conclusion. Part II argues that part of the reason that there has been too little synthesis of the political and personal visions is that legal feminism has resisted developing an appreciation for the role of personal relationships. Developing this appreciation requires reevaluating the roles that relationships, privacy, and men play in many women's lives. This means first coming to terms with some normative vision that includes an understanding of relationships. Feminism must recognize that many women still seem to want relationships more than they demand symmetrical distributions of economic and social power. Second, feminism must be more willing to evaluate the positive role that privacy can play in relationships. Privacy is something that most people appear to want in relationships. Accordingly, it may be unfair and counterproductive to expect battered women simply to relinquish their privacy in the name of politics. Third, coming to terms with the role of relationships in our lives means coming to terms with the likelihood that women cannot solve the problem of domestic violence on their own. If what women want is a world in which personal relationships can be meaningful and interdependent, then attacking the problem of domestic violence has to be about changing men as much as it is about empowering women. The psychological work being done with men in the area of domestic violence is political work even as it is personal work. Unless the masculine psychology that condones aggression is changed, battered women will be forced to choose between safety and involvement in personal relationships.

Elizabeth Schneider has done feminism a great service by writing this book. With diligence and honesty, she details just how complex and difficult these issues are. Any meaningful proposal to help battered women must wrestle with the paradoxes that she carefully explains. Any thoughtful analysis of feminism must understand the tensions between theory and practice. This Review is an attempt to reconcile some of the dilemmas that Schneider presents. Although it suggests an alternative course to the one Schneider prescribes, it wholeheartedly adopts Schneider's belief in the dialectic. Taking that dialectic seriously means formulating new, not simply rejecting old, understandings of personal relationships, privacy, and gender.

1. SCHNEIDER'S DIALECTICS

   For anyone who has wondered why domestic violence remains such a prevalent problem, Elizabeth Schneider's book is an excellent place to start. As one who from the beginning of her legal career has been at the forefront of both the theoretical discussion(3) and practical lawyering(4) surrounding battered women, Schneider is ideally suited to explore what she calls the "tensions and paradoxes"(5) in this movement. She does so thoroughly.

   The book is broken into four parts, all but the last containing three chapters each. The first part, "Domestic Violence as a Social and Legal Problem," starts with a brief introduction and then dives into history. Relying on the work of Linda Gordon(6) and Reva Siegel,(7) Schneider shows not only that domestic violence has always been a part of Western culture,(8) but that attempts to redress the problem legally have always run into the same sort of obstacles American reformers face today. During the nineteenth century, the legal understanding of marriage changed from a relationship of hierarchy, in which men had a legal right to control their wives physically, to a relationship of companionship. With that move from hierarchy to companionship came a veil of privacy that blocked the law's willingness to accept responsibility for domestic violence. Even when the law was willing to accept jurisdiction over domestic disputes, the most it was willing to do was punish the perpetrator. But then, as now, punishing the perpetrator without providing some sort of economic and social support for the victim left victims with an untenable choice. As Linda Gordon observed, "[g]iven a choice, [nineteenth-century domestic violence victims] might have preferred economic aid to prosecution of wife-beaters."(9)

   The essentially feminist nature of domestic violence work becomes obvious in this historical account because domestic violence is visible as a problem only when feminists have a voice. Thus, it was visible as an issue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but, with no vibrant feminist community to articulate its harms, it died out as an issue for most of the middle part of the twentieth century. It was not until the early 1970s, with the rise of the second wave of feminism, that activists and newspapers began to make the issue real again.

   Schneider describes the 1970s activism around domestic violence with admiration.(10) Many domestic violence activists got their start in consciousness-raising groups, and they viewed the problem of battering as an inherently political problem. Battered women's shelters and organizations were sites for political organizing, and battered women were seen as political allies, not clients.(11) Much of this has now changed. As more state money flowed into battered women's programs and as more sociologists and psychologists started studying the issue, battered women's shelters became places that provided services to clients, rather than places of activism. Battered women became psychologically damaged victims, not political recruits. The families in which the violence occurred became particular objects of study, not microcosms of a broader system of gender power. In short, what started as a political problem in the 1970s has become once again a personal one.

   In the last chapter of Part I, "Dimensions of Feminist Lawmaking," Schneider dives into the theoretical dimensions of battering, particularly the relationship between rights and battered women's advocacy. It is in this chapter that she introduces the critical importance of State v. Wanrow,(12) a case that Schneider helped litigate.(13) Although Wanrow did not involve violence between intimates, it was formative in establishing the need to integrate a distinct women's perspective into feminist lawmaking. Yvonne Wanrow was a Native American woman who killed a white man. She killed the man after he entered her babysitter's home, uninvited, while she and her children were there. Wanrow was on crutches at the time and had reason to believe that the intruder had already tried to molest one of her children. She shot him. In articulating Wanrow's claim of self-defense, her advocates needed to explain why it was necessary to think about the "self" and "defense" of a temporarily disabled woman of color as not necessarily the same as the "self" and "defense" associated with men. Feminist theory provided this explanation. A feminist understanding of Wanrow's "self" included incorporating her role as mother and caretaker, and a feminist understanding of her ability to defend herself included appreciating her physical inability to counter his strength with anything less than lethal force. She was at once more than one person as traditionally defined because her "self" included her children, and less able to defend...