Ordinary Violence: Everyday Assaults Against Women

Violence against women cannot be understood as an expression of individual rage or inadequacy or as a characteristic of the violent or violated. As long as women are the other, degraded and devalued because they are female rather than male, which is to say as long as women do not have power equal to that of men in the political, economic, and social realm, they will be abused. Violence against women cannot be disentangled from the cultural, economic, and social context within which it occurs. While violence takes varying forms in different cultures, reflecting the differential power of women and different definitions of women’s value in these cultures, in each it reflects the cultural definitions of woman and the feminine as subordinate, and reinforces the gender structure in which women are oppressed. This book provides a theoretical and conceptual approach to the intricate relationship between gender structure and the many forms of violence against women. This structure, woven through class and culture, is the root cause of the commonplace violence against women. Political and economic restructuring must be achieved in order to eliminate the commonplace occurrence of genital mutilations, kitchen fires, bride burning, female infanticide, rape, battery, sexual harassment. The author specifically addresses a wide range of everyday and ordinary oppressions of women, linking each with the underlying gender structure. Assumptions about women and men, femininity and masculinity, and relationships as expressed in music, novels, and the organization of the family and work are related to the violence women experience in their everyday lives. The author explores the rather insidious ways in which even those who are devoted to the elimination of violence against women often unintentionally support its continuing devastation of women.