Heroes of Their Own Lives: the Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston 1880-1960.

• Author: Elliot, Laura

Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston 1880-1960. Linda Gordon. Viking, $24.95. Last November, the country was shocked to learn of the death of seven-year-old Lisa Steinberg in New York City -- police evidence indicated that her death resulted form beatings by one or both of her adoptive parents. The most distressing aspect of her story, of course, is that home is not the proverbial calm harbor. Adding to the shock over the Steinberg case was the fact that the family was part of New York's upper middle-class, a segment of society believed to be civilized and kind.

Americans tend to think that domestic violence is an isolated, recent horror. In fact, battering, child neglect, abuse, and incest (the four types or domestic violence as defined by Gordon) are ancient problems, and the United States began actively trying to control them 100 year ago. Gordon traces the history of family violence and society's response to it through case studies taken Boston's child protection agencies from 1980 to 1960.

Gordon doesn't just recount poignant family histories. She shows how the four types of crimes are often linked and simultaneous, particularly wife-beating and incest. She also contends that social currents reflected and shaped standards of family behavior by creating narrowed emphases for agency workers, sometimes to the detriment of the very families they were trying to aid.

For instance, around the turn of the century, when feminists descried "drunkenness" and believed that brutality was inherent in men, social workers, who then were mostly affulent do gooders, focused on the father or husband, often naively blaming everything on the influence of liquor. Following World War II, fascination with the science of psychiatry often resulted in workers making diagnoses that dismissed woman in abusive relationships as masochistic or the stories of incest victims as fantasies growing from their neuroses.

Gordon is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her narative is scholarly, thick with professional research, and not for those uniformed about the basics of family violence. It, is, however, fascinating reading for historians of social work and feminism and for those interest in patterns of...