Battle Cries: Black Women and Intimate Partner Abuse ‐ by Hillary Potter

Abstract

Battle Cries: Black Women and Intimate Partner Abuse. Hillary Potter. New York: New York University Press. 2008. 273 pp. ISBN 9700814767306. $23.00 paper. Battle Cries is Hillary Potter's analysis of interviews with 40 Black women who have left their abusive male partners. The book is rich with these women's perspectives on their own experiences (and often their perceptions of how their experiences differ from those of abused White women), providing us with multiple, concrete reminders that there is no universal woman. The experiences of these particular Black women are the foundation for Potter's most general point: We must not address intimate partner abuse from a belief that the experiences of this abuse are similar across races, ethnicities, cultures, nationalities, and sexual orientation (p. 200). Of course, as with all good qualitative work, this book gets well below such abstractions to illustrate the concrete ways in which the fact that these women are of African descent living in the contemporary United States inflects their experiences. Four substantive chapters are the heart of the book. Surviving Childhood covers the women's perceptions of the relevance of fheir childhood experiences for their adult reactions to abuse. Many of them had experienced or witnessed violence, and those experiences affected them in dramatically different ways. For example, for some of the women, observing the abuse of their mother led to a determination not to live with such abuse themselves, whereas for others, the experience kept them from recognizing their own abuse as quickly as they might have had they grown up in a more peaceful setting. Living Through provides a rich description of the structure of the abuse the women experienced, a description that validates the long line of feminist research that documents the role of coercive control in male intimate terrorism (Johnson, 2008). Fighting Back documents the resistance, both physical and otherwise, that characterizes most of these women. Although Potter emphasizes the cultural tradition of the strong Black woman as a major reason that Black women resist abuse, I was struck more by the extent to which these women's reactions sound very much like those described in other research on women dealing with coercive controlling violence. Despite Potter's tendency to label every behavior of these women as resistance, I strongly recommend the chapter as a rich discussion of the meaning and dynamics of resistance for these Black women. I have argued elsewhere that violent resistance is one of the most understudied types of intimate partner violence, and Potter's book is an important contribution to that literature. Getting Out is the final substantive chapter. It is the longest chapter in the book and discusses the diverse and complicated paths by which these women escaped from their abusers. Again, I would argue that most of this process is similar to that described in other studies of women who have left their abusers (e.g., Kirkwood, 1 993) but with elements that are specific to the experiences of African American women. For example, a number of the respondents reported that they were concerned about the stigma of being another single Black mother or were worried that if they left their partner they would deprive their children of a male role model - in short supply in their communities. The substantive chapters make Battle Cries a particularly rich addition to the research literature regarding (a) the dynamic and creative means by which women cope with intimate partner abuse and (b) the particular perspectives of African American women on that experience. In my view, Battle Cries is for that reason essential reading for professionals in the field, both researchers and practitioners. Two major concerns, however, temper my positive feelings about the book. First, the book did not get the editing it deserved. I found myself frequently confused by the author's sentences or lines of argument, and it was not unusual for me to conclude that I was indeed dealing with contradictions and non sequiturs. …