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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $79.95

Format:
Hardback
208 pp.
4 line-cuts, 239 mm x 163 mm

ISBN-13:
9780195398502

Publication date:
August 2011

Imprint: OUP US


Poverty, Battered Women, and Work in U.S. Public Policy

Lisa D. Brush

Series : Interpersonal Violence

Drawing on longitudinal interviews, government records, and personal narratives, feminist sociologist Lisa Brush examines the intersection of work, welfare, and battering. Brush contrasts conventional wisdom with illuminating analyses of social change and social structures, highlighting how race and class shape women's experiences with poverty and abuse and how "domestic" violence moves out of the home and follows women to work.

Brush's unique interview data on work-related control, abuse, and sabotage, together with administrative data on earnings, welfare, and restraining orders, offer new empirical insights on the impact of work requirements and other post-welfare rescission changes on the lives of low-income and battered mothers. Personal narratives provide first-hand accounts of women's perceptions of the broad forces that shape the circumstances of their everyday lives, their health, their prospects, their ambitions, and their diagnoses of their world. Deftly integrating the political and the personal, the administrative and the narrative, the economic and the emotional, Brush underscores the vital need to reexamine ideas, policies, and practices meant to keep women safe and economically productive that instead trap women in poverty and abuse.

With her fresh approach to problems people often see as intractable, Brush offers a new way of calculating the costs of battering for the policy makers and practitioners concerned with the well being of poor, battered women and their families and communities.

Readership : Students and researchers of social work, sociology, and political science.

1. Introduction
2. Conventional Wisdom and its Discontents
3. What Happens When Abusers Follow Women to Work?
4. Calculating the Costs of Taking a Beating
5. Welfare Recipients Talk Back
6. Conclusions
Methodological Appendix
References
Notes

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Lisa D. Brush, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.

Coercive Control - Evan Stark
Restorative Justice and Violence Against Women - Edited by James Ptacek
Familicidal Hearts - Neil Websdale
Violence in Context - Edited by Todd I. Herrenkohl, Eugene Aisenberg, James Herbert Williams and Jeffrey M. Jenson
Making Sense in the Social Sciences - Margot Northey, Lorne Tepperman and Patrizia Albanese

Special Features

  • American Sociological Association, NCSW, American Political Science Association, Sociologists for Women in Society, Society for the Study of Social Problems, Council on Social Work Education, Society for Social Work & Research.
  • Provides an intersectional approach to race, poverty, welfare, and battering.
  • Links poverty and battering as issues of human rights and social inclusion.
  • Critiques traditional solutions to battering and poverty that seek to control women's behavior and character through employment incentives.
  • Weaves together quantitative and qualitative data.