Heroes of Their Own Lives:

...The conclusion, placing family violence at the center of tensions between the state and private rights in the twentieth century, is a succinct and powerful statement of issues...

...High standards...

...Though this schema takes its bearings from the changing ideology of caseworkers, Gordon is exceptionally clear about the resourcefulness of survivors searching out the few avenues by which they might find help...

...For instance, The child protection agencies originally tried to avoid intervention between husbands and wives, but their clients, mainly mothers, virtually dragged the child protectors into wife-beating problems...

...Gordon's work is path-breaking, combining new sources and feminist sensitivity, probing theory and care for evidence...

...The questions animating this text are good examples...

...How do we interpret the silences that remain...

...Where would we look to find it...

...It so energetically clarified these debates that I will never listen to them again in the same way...

...The stories of black women, Hispanic women, Asian women, poor white women, are passed through an utterly secular mesh-most probably that of the caseworkers who interviewed and recorded these otherwise revealing stories...

...They can only be asked at all today because of the feminist movement's exposure of violence against women and children...

...Even to notice family violence required us to learn new perspectives, to perceive the world differently...

...Just twenty years ago these were nonquestions...

...3) The Depression, when economic hardship became more important than family violence to helping agencies...

...4) The 1940s and 1950s when psychiatric categories dominated social casework interpretation of family violence, with predictably negative results for its victims...

...The one bone I would pick about the book is perhaps not with Gordon...

...And like all good books, this one raises as many questions as it answers...

...References to religion of any kind are virtually non-existent...

...It's yet another step to notice that family violence has a history...

...The text is peppered with both insights and hypotheses...

...This stimulates an economistic hypothesis: economic dependence prevented women's formulation of a sense of entitlement to protection against marital violence, but it also gave them a sense of entitlement to support...

...The four meatiest chapters treat the specifics of child neglect, child physical abuse, incest, and wife-beating...

...2) The Progressive era and its aftermath, 1910-1930 roughly, incorporated treatment of family violence work into professional social work, including the regularizing of casework notes and files...

...the excitement comes from the way Gordon probes for theory in and through cases...

...Social service providers, activists in shelters and crisis centers, survivors of family violence, people concerned about the state of "the" family, scholars, clergy-all ought to be reading this book, which has so much to tell us about the terms bequeathed to us by our predecessors in these areas...

...Indeed, the valor and creativity of survivors is a continual theme of this treatment (hence the book's title...

...The historian's creativity matches that of the subjects about whom she writes...

...For instance, ironically, the sense of moral superiority of the upper-middle-class helpers (so unacceptable to people concerned about classism) is what made their agencies "more able to face the existence of problems-including sexual abuse of children and wife-beating-often considered unmentionable...

...Each is replete with descriptions of individual cases that make difficult but exciting reading...

...Mary Pellauer Readers familiar with Linda Gordon's earlier work, on the history of birth control in Amer-ica, will recognize the themes and style of Heroes of Their Own Lives, even through the very different subject matter...

...Few nonhistorians would have thought to find such rich materials in the casework files of child protection agencies...

...How do we understand what we find...

...For instance, The 1930s were the divide in this study, after which the majority of women clients complained directly rather than indirectly about wife-beating...

...Indeed throughout eighty years in which there were periods of strong professional disinclination to acknowledge the existence of wife-beating, battered women kept up a remarkably steady level of complaints to child-protection agencies...

...Heroes of Their Own Lives meets them...

...She is explicit about the complications of this history...

...Such stories are always painful...

...Before the present wave of activism, Gordon sees: (1) The late nineteenth century-when broader moral reform movements (temperance and feminism) influenced the treatment of family violence...

...by contrast, the growth of a wage labor economy lessened women's sense of entitlement to support from their husbands but allowed them to insist on their physical integrity...

...Her creativity is emblematic of the best of feminist scholarship in the last two decades, asking new questions, looking for new directions, even in fields once thought "overplowed...

...What is the history of family violence...