Violence Against Women in Kentucky: A History of U.S. and State Legislative Reform by Carol E. Jordan (review)

Carol E. Jordan’s study of domestic violence, rape, and stalking reforms in Kentucky is a timely book that addresses the struggles encountered by grassroots and formal advocacy groups in achieving legislative victories. In light of high-profile domestic violence cases in the National Football League and recent investigations into potential cover-ups of sexual assaults occurring on college campuses, Jordan’s work poses itself as valuable state study that highlights the fortitude it took to convince political officials of the need to create, strengthen, and enforce laws that protect women from violence.

Violence Against Women in Kentucky is arranged chronologically and thematically with the last four chapters focusing specifically on more than one hundred bills that represented state legislative reform from the 1970s to 2012. Jordan emphasizes the importance of grassroots women’s rights advocates in achieving protections for women and seeks to render visible Kentucky women who survived or fell victim to rape, domestic violence, and stalking. She uses oral histories, legislative records, and her own experience as an advocate and member of the Governor’s Task Force on Sexual Assault, created in 1999 under Governor Paul Patton, to highlight the successes and failures of domestic violence, rape, and stalking reforms.

Jordan is all too right in her argument that historians have largely ignored the issue of violence against women as it applies to Kentucky (1). She offers a powerful retelling of the impact domestic violence, rape, and stalking has had on the lives of survivors and victims. The experiences of these women not only illustrates the many types of abuses and need for reform, but also puts faces and names to the meticulously researched legislative actions also described in the book. Indeed, including stories of survivors and victims demonstrate how “the domestic violence movement took experiences of women and used them to fight for legislative reforms.” (103).

Jordan discusses how conceptions of gender and women’s legal status presented obstacles to gaining reforms. Kentucky, as well as most of the nation, drew its laws related to rape and domestic violence from the tradition of English Common Law. Jordan highlights how the legacy of English Common Law, which positioned women as property of their husbands, presented advocacy groups with difficult challenges related to social constructions of gender. Specifically, because of the law of coverture, Kentucky advocates lobbied to have marital rape recognized as a criminal offense for decades, although with limited success (323–324).

Working alongside and oftentimes confronting a primarily male legislative body in the state, left advocates, including Jordan, constantly are challenging the historical notion that “women lie.” Many male legislators approached rape, domestic violence, and stalking reforms with concerns related to false accusations. Jordan also does not address the great number of historical issues surrounding the idea that women cannot be trusted to tell the truth. This includes important questions related to race and class. Even though Jordan’s purpose is to highlight legislative reforms, it is hard to gain a complete understanding of the deep-seeded cultural and social challenges female advocates faced in their fight for reform without engaging in the history of how gender, race, and class biases fueled legislators’ overriding concerns with protecting men from false accusations.

Additionally, the book barely mentions how race and class influence the perceived believability of female accusers or the conviction rates of men. Jordan acknowledges that women do not “experience or react to victimization in the same way” and calls for legislative changes that “reflect new knowledge about race, ethnicity, culture, poverty, and related issues” (374). However, she does not provide any further analysis of what this new knowledge is or how, perhaps, these economic and social categories have fed into the limitations behind reforms that the book does so well in describing.

These historical oversights make Jordan’s work a useful resource for present and aspiring advocates wanting to understand the...