Applications Of Feminist Legal Theory

Women's Experience and the Problem of Transition: Perspectives on Male Battering of Women

A ~~) Women's Experience and the Problem ofTransition: Perspectives on Male Battering ofWomen CHRISTINE A. LITTLETON Try thinking without apology with what you know from being victimized.' FEMINISM IS (or at least aspires to be) a theory and practice forged directly from women's experience as women. It thus directly implicates our biological status (as female), our sociological status (as those who are identified as, and treated as, women) and our political status (as those who identify with women). As Catharine MacKinnon notes, the "methodological secret" of feminism is that it is built on "believing women's accountS,"2 on recognizing women's experience as centra\. When applied to (or in) law, feminism becomes feminist jurisprudence. Feminist jurisprudence refuses to take legal categories or doctrines as given, and thus refuses to limit itself to shaping women's experience to fit the current outlines of established law. Reversing the traditional process of introducing new ideas into law by trying to show that a new idea is very much like an old one, feminist jurisprudence takes women's experience as the starting point, whether or not our experience is "very much like" the experience of those who have previously made the rules and set the standards.... Because women's experience is the central building block of feminist jurisprudence , it is necessary to deal explicitly ... with the question of how to evaluate women's experience.... Feminist theorists have long struggled with potential approaches to ... the paradox of diversity in commonality.... One approach is to define accounts that do not fit a theorist's particular experience as "false consciousness."... A second approach to the diversity of women's accounts views feminism as made up of a variety of "feminisms"-all ofwhich are inherently partial . ... Between the Scylla offalse consciousness and the Charybdis of uncritical pluralism lies the possibility of a third option.... This option requires a dialectic between our own descriptions of our varying experience and the conditions under which such descriptions are made. Rather than viewing any woman's description as, on the one hand, potentially inaccurate, socially conditioned or merely the product of internalized oppression ; or, on the other, individualized, attributable solely to determinants other 1989 U. Chi. Legal F. 23. Copyrighted Material 327 328 I CHRISTINE A. LITTLETON than gender, or exceptional, I suggest that we should use as a working hypothesis the assumption that women's descriptions of our experience are accurate, reasonable and potentially understandable given the conditions under which we live. Tensions and contradictions in women's descriptions give us a way to examine and criticize the conditions under which we live, rather than a reason to deny status to some descriptions or to consider other descriptions as relevant to some women but not others. The task for ... this essay is to use this "third option" to examine the experience of women in one context-battering-where distortion of that experience seems ubiquitous.3 B. The Context ofBattering By some estimates, almost half of all marriages are marked by battering episodes,4 and many more women are battered by their boyfriends, fiances or lovers. Yet battering per se occupies very little of the legal landscape, at least as measured by law review pages and published opinions. "Law" seems to come in only at the extremes, as, for instance, when long-term victims of battering escape through the unusual route of killing their tormenters. For most battered women, "the police always come late if they come at all."5 It is often said that rape victims are raped twice-once by the rapist and once by the legal system. If that is so, then battered women are battered three times--once by the batterer, a second time by society and finally by the legal system. Traditional society blames the victim ofbattering for "deserving" the punishment. Ifonly she had been a better wife, a more submissive helpmate, a more compliant sexual partner, then her nose would not have been broken, her eye would still be uncut, the bruises would never have marked her thighs. The legal system is somewhat more generous. It does not blame all battered women for their plight, only those who do not immediately sever their relationships and leave their batterers. Women who have been battered tell stories that include fear (the one story law might listen to), love (a story usually heard as masochism), desire for connection (a story hardly heard at all) and absence of options (often dismissed as "objectively" inaccurate ). Must we be forced...