Procure Heroes Of Their Own Lives: The Politics And History Of Family Violence--Boston, 1880-1960 Author Linda Gordon Distributed As Publication

class we have been discussing a lot of positives and negatives about this book, but I think most readers who are interested in the topic will find the book fascinating and will not particularly care about the various ways it can be criticized.
The biggest problem is that pretty much all of this is based on one set of sources case records prepared by social workers, These social workers were middle or upper class people, and they were recording information about lower class people, often immigrants, We really have nothing from the lower class people directly, This isn't really Gordon's fault, though, . . it would be great if there was a collection of working class immigrant diaries and letters out there, but those are really hard to come by.
These case reports are what we have, So everything we know about these people and what happened in their homes comes through the interpretation of someone of a different class, different ethnic group, and probably different faith and possibly different first language.

That being said, the really interesting thing here is how Gordon traces the way conceptions of family violence changed over time, and the way ideas about gender and the family played into this change.
For example, women began to take more and more blame, as child "neglect" was identified as a problem, In previous generations, and in some of the cultures these immigrants were coming from, everyone in the household was supposed to contribute to the household economy.
But American reformers became more and more focused on what was "proper" for a family a working father and a mother at home with the children.
In many of these impoverished households, mothers needed to work, but that by definition made them "neglectful" mothers, as they were not doing what the reformers saw as their primary job.
A father, by contrast, could not really be neglectful, because he was supposed to be working outside the home, So in a household with two working parents, child neglect was taking place, and it came to be seen as only the fault of the mother.

I had never really thought about the changing definition of abuse, and I had certainly never considered how gender played into it, so much of this book was eye opening for me.
It was also interesting to receive these little glimpses into the lives of poor Bostonians, even though as noted above we need to remember the sources of those glimpses.
Such a biased book. It is clear that the author is a historian since she went to all the effort of reading the case files from the MSPCC but I was often left wondering why she chose only Boston I know she told us but still when she herself is from Wisconsin.
Surely she could have looked at several different cities to have gotten an average of the social work in the country at the time.
The fact that she only looked at Boston if the reader is not aware of this fact makes it look like the problem of family violence and the need for social workers was overwhelming in the lateth and earlyth centuries.
I know that the author was trying to highlight the struggles of women in her book but by leaving out men from her equation so many times she has not presented the full history that she should have known as a good historian she was responsible to give her readers.
This book is not something that I would have picked up on a normal basis and by reading it proves that while I may have been a history major in college, I still do not enjoy histories about violence and the like.
Give me a good book on a King or Queen of Europe anyday and I will have it done by midnight, In this unflinching history of family violence, Linda Gordon traces policies on child abuse and neglect, wife beating, and incest fromto, Gordon begins with the socalled discovery of family violence in thes, when experts first identified it as a social rather than personal problem.
From there, Gordon chronicles the changing visibility of family violence as gender, family, and political ideologies shifted and the womens and civil rights movements gained strength.
Throughout, she illustrates how public perceptions of issues like marriage, poverty, alcoholism, mental illness, and responsibility worked for and against the victims of family violence, and looks at the link between family violence and larger social problems.
Powerful and moving, Heroes of Their Own Lives offers an honest understanding of a persistent problem and a realistic view of the difficulties in stopping it.
This book was very helpful for my paper on the social construction of Child Maltreatment, It explores how Boston looked at child abuse and the social control of the upper and middle class imposed on the poor, This is the way a history based on organizational records should be done, Excellent examination of family violence based on the records of a Boston children's welfare organization, Well written, compelling, and thought provoking This was interesting, but a bit old perhaps, There were some issues, such as speaking about the white Americans as "native" and I too got confused about the Freudian stuff, In some cases the author was clearly referring to the beliefs of the historical time she was researching but in some occasions it sounded a bit like the author herself was also defending those Freudian theories.


But all in all it was still and interesting read, Just keep in mind, that the book is from the's, Linda Gordon is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University, She is the author of numerous books and won

the Bancroft Prize for The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, She lives in New York, Linda Gordon is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University, She is the author of numerous books and won the Bancroft Prize for The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, She lives in New York, " sitelink.