Abstract
In Poverty, Battered Women, and Work in U.S. Public Policy, Lisa D. Brush challenges the prevailing narratives that society uses to explain women’s poverty, work force participation, and experiences of being battered. Using a variety of data sources, she demonstrates how three of these narratives have led to a shortsighted policy agenda that portrays work as the remedy to both battering and poverty.
Brush contends that the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and the Violence Against Women Act were both heavily influenced by the hegemonic and neoliberal explanations for the receipt of welfare, poverty, paid work, and battering. These explanations, also referred to in the text as “conventional wisdom,” provide understandable, though uncritical, common sense explanations of the causes and relationships among these phenomena. The first narrative discussed is “Victim Empowerment Folklore,” which proposes that women can rise up, become empowered, and leave their abusers. Women then must marshal their resources with the ultimate goal of obtaining paid work and being less dependent on men. From the perspective of the “Criminological Expertise” and “Law and Order Logic” explanations for battering, men are violent and women are vulnerable, and few social or legal constraints are powerful enough to prevent men from battering women. Changes in law enforcement and legal procedures to increase the consequences of men’s violent behavior are then necessary. Finally, the “Politics of Disgust” and “Work-First-Common Sense” narratives propose that the receipt of welfare is an issue of a poor work ethic and poor decision making, especially concerning moral choices. Women who receive welfare have had children they cannot support, and the solution to this problem is to promote paid work, marriage, and sexual restraint.
Brush argues that these explanations make intuitive sense, as all taken-for-granted ideas do, until they are deconstructed and their contradictions are made clear. For example, she demonstrates how women’s employment options are affected when their batterers harass them at work, physically prevent them from working or sabotage their job search. Similarly, women can receive welfare for a limited time and are required to seek work, even though they will never be able to leave an impoverished status with low wage and often part-time employment. For both these situations, work is presented as a moral imperative even though it is not truly a solution to the problem of women’s poverty and need to depend on potentially abusive partners.
For Brush, a feminist structural analysis leads to solutions that begin with viewing battering and poverty through the lenses of social justice and human rights. She advocates for developing policy structures that address the rights to safety; having material needs met; and living a meaningful and fulfilling life. A guiding narrative of human rights and social justice could make the emphasis on enforcing work requirements for battered women who are receiving welfare seem misguided and allow for a refocusing on policies and practices that are preventive and sustainable over the long term.
A helpful addition to this book would have been a discussion of existing international efforts to frame battering and poverty as human rights issues, such as the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These documents, and the policies and practices that flow from them, may serve as examples of the kinds of policy structures Brush would like to see implemented in the United States.
This book serves as an important reminder to social work practitioners and educators that efforts to empower women who are battered can have a shadow side that is uncomfortably close to blaming women for the situation in which they find themselves. Empowerment of individuals is important to social work practice, but, as Brush reminds us, we must be equally engaged in challenging existing social structures that fail to recognize the humanity and inherent worth of these individuals and in establishing new social structures that do.