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When Is A Battered Woman Not A Battered Woman? When She Fights Back, Leigh Goodmark

Leigh Goodmark

Over the past thirty years, the public, media, and the legal system have coalesced around a stereotypical image of the victim of domestic violence. Before the birth of the battered women’s movement, the assumption was that domestic violence happened to “them”—poor African American women who lived in slums. Advocacy by the battered women’s movement around the idea that domestic violence is endemic in all races, ethnicities, religions and socioeconomic brackets, coupled with the introduction of “battered woman syndrome” and its reliance on the theory of learned helplessness to explain why battered women remained in abusive relationships, changed the portrait of …