ABSTRACT
Linda Gordon maps out a new history of social welfare by bringing gender into view. This essay probes the successive frames of interpretation that have guided understandings of family violence, from the nativism of early twentieth-century reformers to the feminism of our own time. In examining historians’ interpretations, Gordon comments extensively on the “social control” critique, a historiographical position that emphasizes reform as a vehicle for maintaining the dominant class and controlling those who are seen to threaten it. Gordon does not entirely reject the historiography of reform as social control, but she argues that it does not allow us a way to understand family violence from within.
