The Personal Is Political-and Economic: Rethinking Domestic Violence

I. Introduction

All social movements that engage matters of law and intimate relationships confront the challenge of sustaining theoretical coherence. Time passes; circumstances change. Theory developed in the context of one set of objective conditions, at a discrete historical moment, must

possess the capacity to adapt to different conditions at later historical moments. This is particularly true when theory serves to inform praxis and when theoretical formulations serve to inform the strategies that affect the lives of real people.

The domestic violence movement is no exception. Feminist scholarship originally presented a clear and compelling discourse about the causes and consequences of domestic violence. The emphasis was on the privilege with which patriarchy was institutionalized in public realms as a matter of practice and law. Women activists responded to an emerging understanding about domestic violence and engaged in a protracted struggle to obtain public condemnation of what had been previously considered a private matter. Public attitudes did indeed change, and advocates were increasingly successful in securing legal remedies to domestic violence. The goals of domestic violence activists were explicit: to conceptualize domestic violence as an offense against women, to oblige law enforcement to treat violence against women as a legal issue - specifically as a crime - and to charge batterers with crimes commensurate with the severity of the harm inflicted on their victims.1