ABSTRACT
These pages explore the uses of violence to enforce an idealization of a family regime of male dominance and female subordination. The literature on wife abuse is full of brief quotations in which women and also, to some extent, men speak about violence, why it is used, and their reactions. Interspersed with the interpretations of the researchers are fragments spoken from the worlds they seek to understand. The literature tends to individuate the problem by attaching attributes such as need to control, dependency, and so on to typified “batterers” or battered. But many of the quotations from people's own accounts tell of events and feelings fully articulated to the social organization of family life. Indeed, they are as much stories of the social organization of men's and women's family relationships, and the part that force plays in them, as stories of individuals. Focusing on the individual batterer deflects attention from the social organization within which force is used.
