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These two very different books approach the subject of marital discord from a paranoid and a depressive position respectively. Marital Violence takes a paranoid position in seeing wife-battering as a manifestation of patriarchy, the organisation of society based on male power over women. Men are the accused and so too is the existing social establishment which bolsters itself and ensures its survival by supporting the continuance of male domination. Mental health professionals and social welfare agencies are seen as the instruments by which the phenomena of male domination are neutralised by re-defining the issues and rendering them particularised and susceptible to social management as instances of personal pathology. Marital violence is equated with wife-battering until the last chapter in the book which is devoted to debunking the notion of the ‘battered husband’ syndrome. It is symptomatic of the bias of the authors that when conjugal murders are analysed in this last chapter, the fact that in 43% of the sample the wife was the murderer is minimised by asking us to consider that the husbands used much more violence in their murders and that the wives were provoked.
No consideration is given at all to the psychology of the victims. The women are simply unfortunate, ill-informed victims. The men, on the other hand, are given no voice. Women are extensively questioned and their histories studied but the experience of their assailants is as excluded from this book as they themselves are from the refuges which shelter their battered wives. Two small glimpses into the more complex emotional realities behind wife battering did emerge. There is a chapter on the response offered by friends and relatives to victims of wife battering. The author attributes the reluctance of some victims to avail themselves of the real help they could have from friends and relatives, to their desire to be independent. It does then occur to her that it is paradoxical that a woman would choose