Domestic violence and the theoretical discourse of freedom

Frontiers, 1996 by Hirschmann, Nancy J

A woman in Philadelphia is beaten by her husband and admitted to a hospital. This is the second time in a year that this woman (I'll call her Susan) has had to seek medical attention for her injuries. Her sister Sarah wants her to press charges. At first, Susan considers it: she is frightened and very angry. But during the few days she is forced to spend at the hospital, her husband initiates contact with her, sending her flowers and gifts and calling her frequently with apologetic and loving messages. Susan decides to return to him. She says that he has apologized and that she forgives him; that he is basically a good person and has promised to change; that he loves her and is a good father; that she loves him; that it was partly her fault anyway; that he needs her.

This pattern is by now familiar to her sister. In fact, this is the third time that Susan has decided to return to her husband after a violent incident. Sarah thinks Susan should seek the help of a battered women's shelter, perhaps enter psychotherapy to help her identify her situation realistically and confront it, go through a job-training program so she can support herself, and thus free herself from an oppressive situation. However, Susan always refuses her advice and encouragement. Sarah knows, from reading about it, that Susan is like many other women in this regard. In fact, she has read that the local battered women's shelter is now lobbying the state legislature for a law mandating prosecution for domestic violence. is would guarantee that the abuser is put in jail and thus force women at least to consider more seriously the alternatives shelters provide for therapy and economic independence, if not actually to take advantage of these alternatives. Sarah supports this effort and sees it as Susan's only hope.

Certainly, the tensions between these two positions--that of Susan, who wants to maintain her relationship, and that of Sarah, who wants her sister to achieve security and independence--are fraught with many complicated issues ranging from the most intensely and privately emotional to public policies of the gravest impact. But my central concern in this example is whether, and under which scenario, Susan is free. In particular, since this is the scenario that occurs frequently among battered women, is she free if she returns to (or stays with) her partner? I want to suggest that there is no easy answer to this question. Further, I want to suggest that the dominant discourse of freedom in philosophy and political theory--which founds as well as reflects our popular, everyday conceptions--is inadequate to fully encompass its complexities. I want to suggest that a feminist perspective is necessary not only to understand the relationship of women's experience to existing notions of liberty but also to a new understanding of liberty that can accommodate such experiences.

A concern with questions of freedom in the context of domestic violence may appear to many as the quintessential illustration of philosophy's abstract irrelevance: why talk about freedom when the key issue for many such women is survival? Doesn't a focus on freedom rather than safety already skew our perspective by assuming the possibility of choice within an extremely oppressive situation? Brutality and violence are in themselves bad, and feminists should struggle to put an end to them.

But agency and freedom are part of what motivates our horror and concern: after all, what about a woman who is never physically hurt but is emotionally and psychologically abused? What about women whose partners prevent them from working, seeking outside interests, or even going out of the house without their supervision but do not put their lives in physical jeopardy? Would not such behavior count as a kind of abuse? And is not a key element in our labeling it abusive the fact that a woman's agency, her capacity to make choices and act on them, is being denied? Is that not an important feature of physical abuse as well?

Thus, I believe that freedom is centrally involved in cases of domestic violence.(1) Indeed, the fact at we can dichotomize the relationship between freedom and survival attests to something missing from our understanding of freedom, something that attending to women's experience can supply. Domestic violence presents a particularly fundamental challenge to existing liberty discourse found in political theory and philosophy because at the heart of both is the construction of choice: not only what a woman's choices are--how those choices are actually, materially constructed--but also how the concept of "choice" itself is constructed, what the conceptual parameters are of different definitions of choice, how certain actions are or are not considered "genuine" choice. I view the problem of domestic violence as particularly illustrative of the uncomfortable fit between women's experiences and liberty discourse, and I take the example offered above as a paradigmatic case of the problems involved in reading women's experiences through that discourse.