Saving Bernice: Battered Women, Welfare, and Poverty (Northeastern Series on Gender, Crime, and Law)
In this harrowing account of one woman's experiences with poverty and domestic abuse, Raphael, who previously guest-edited Understanding Women's Poverty, follows the life of Bernice, a child of a dysfunctional family (her alcoholic father poured gasoline over her 13-year-old brother and threw a match at him, burning him to death). Raphael includes the grisly details of Bernice's life as a battered woman and welfare mother, her frustrations with working through various public agencies, and her eventual triumph over her circumstances. Unfortunately, the writing is uneven, and Raphael's use of quotes from Virginia Woolf's writings at the beginning of every chapter seems a stretch. And though she provides evidence supporting her contention that examining domestic abuse necessarily involves examining the welfare system as a whole, this is not a new idea. Linda G. Mills's The Heart of Intimate Abuse: New Interventions in Child Welfare, Criminal Justice, and Health Settings (Springer, 1998) and Ruth A. Brandwein's Battered Women, Children, and Welfare Reform: The Ties That Bind (Sage, 1998) are more scholarly and better written (albeit less personal) sources on the subject. Recommended for specialized collections only.DEllen D. Gilbert, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, NJCopyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.