Family Violence and the Women's Movement: The Conceptual Politics of Struggle

Andrea Levan is Co-ordinator of Women’s Studies and an assistant
professor at Laurentian University.

This book examines the process by which wife assault, an issue
originally brought to public notice by grassroots women’s groups,
became recognized as a social problem to be managed by the state. Walker
is particularly interested in how wife assault came to be defined, first
by feminists struggling to understand the experience of battered women,
and later through the process of government hearings and “concensus
building.” That process effectively wrenched control of the issue from
women in the transition houses and put it in the hands of academics,
professional social service providers, and state agencies.

The book serves an important need in documenting activities of
grassroots Canadian feminists that are not well known, even by many
people working in the field of wife assault. Walker describes feminist
participation in the Vancouver United Way Task Force on Family Violence
in the late 1970s, the 1980 consultative hearings to the federal
Standing Committee on Health, Welfare, and Social Affairs in 1981 and
1982, and hearings of the Ontario Legislature’s Standing Committee on
Social Development in 1982. She provides detailed analysis of many of
the briefs and carefully examines their influence on the resulting
reports. While feminist presentations have had an impact, the net
result, in most cases, was that wife battering came to be defined as a
problem of “family violence,” rooted in the family rather than in
the relations between men and women, and transition houses came to be
seen not as acknowledged sources of experience and expertise, but as
simply another piece in the array of support systems to disturbed
families.

The book also develops a critical understanding of wife assault
literature. Chapter 5, in particular, is useful in analyzing the
scholarly context of major books and the reservations feminists have
about them.

The book puts Walker’s own experiences in the context of scholarly
discourse on the state and provides a thorough and incisive analysis of
how feminist causes can be changed when the state takes them up. Given
her eloquent statement on the tension and contradictions inherent in
working as both a feminist and a professional, this is perhaps not as
accessible to nonacademic feminists as Walker might have hoped.