Quick explains why women need the support and encouragement of female mentors, how to find them, how be a good mentor, and the difference between role models and mentors. Often mothers or older female relatives make ideal mentors, but this role is frequently filled by someone women encounter at school, in the workplace, or through friends. Anthropologists Dorothy Ayers Counts and Judith K. Brown have long been concerned about the wife beating and battering observed by ethnographers. The editors hope that this study will enable us to search for societal reform. Women tend to experience more violence when they are isolated from their kin and are less likely to be beaten when their partners are dependent on them for most of their food.
Younger women tend to be abused more often than older women.
One of the new chapters focuses on how international laws could be used to lessen violence toward women.