When Love Goes Wrong
What to Do When You Can't Do Anything Right
This book was written at the
request of leaders of National Coalition Against Domestic Violence to benefit
millions of women who find themselves in relationships with controlling or
abusive partners and don’t know what to do, or even what’s wrong. A woman may
feel confused, anxious, inadequate, intimidated—or as if she is walking on
eggshells. She may find herself trying harder and harder to make things right
without ever being successful. Ann Jones and her friend the late Susan
Schechter, the well-known activist and writer (Women and Male Violence),
combined their long experience working with abused women and children to offer
an eye-opening analysis of controlling partners and a wealth of information for
women who want to change their lives for the better. Full of moving
first-person stories, When Love Goes Wrong shows women what their options are
in or out of the relationship. It also provides practical guidance on finding
safety and support, a comprehensive list of agencies offering information and
assistance, and very useful advice to family, friends, and therapists who want
to be of help. For all women who find that no matter how hard they try to
please their partner, it’s never enough, When Love Goes Wrong offers sound
supportive advice for reclaiming their lives.
http://www.annjonesonline.com/GoesWrong.html
Women Who Kill
Hailed as a landmark book when it first appeared in 1980, Women Who Kill was recently reissued in a 30th anniversary edition by the Feminist Press;it’s the first title in a series of the Contemporary Classics of feminism. In a new introduction, Ann Jones brings the book and the issues it raises up to date. Women Who Kill is not simply a study of women murderers in America. It is a social history of women in the United States from colonial times to the present told through the often tragic or desperate—and fascinating—stories of women driven to kill.
Unlike men, who are apt to stab a total stranger in a drunken brawl or run amok with a high-powered rifle, women rarely resort to murder; but when they do, they are likely to kill their intimates—husbands, lovers, or children. Taking such homicidal patterns as “shadows of profound cultural deformities,” Ann Jones explores what they reflect about women and our culture. Informed by meticulous research, Women Who Kill considers notorious women such as axe-murderer Lizzie Borden, acquitted of killing her parents, Belle Gunness, the Indiana housewife turned serial killer, Ruth Snyder, the “adulteress” electrocuted for the murder of her husband, and Jean Harris, convicted of shooting her lover, the “Scarsdale Diet doctor.” But there are dozens of unknown women in these pages, women from all walks of life, compelled to violence by their times, then lost to history. From crimes of infanticide in colonial days through the poisoning of husbands in the nineteenth century to the battered wives who fight back today, Ann Jones recounts tales of crime and punishment that reveal hard truths about American society and woman’s place in it.
NEXT TIME SHE'LL BE DEAD
Battering & How To Stop It
Fifteen years after she first wrote about wife beating in Women Who Kill, Ann Jones returned to the subject to ask: Why are women still being battered in America? In Next Time, She’ll Be Dead, she argues that all women have the right to live free from bodily harm. Yet violence against women continues. Next Time, She’ll Be Dead examines four habits of the American mind that cloud our thinking about woman battering and contribute to the persistence of what we euphemistically call “domestic violence.” First, we cling to a popular conviction that if abused women seek help from the law, they get it, when in fact the law itself often adds to the abuse they undergo. Second, we fool ourselves about the real nature of battering, mainly by speaking of it in the language of love; and we grossly underestimate how deadly it is. Third, we commingle and confuse sex, anger, aggression, and violence, and perpetuate that confusion in pop culture. And finally, and perhaps most important, we persist in the tendency to blame victims for “their” problems. Jones illustrates how all these habits of mind come together to the detriment of all women by closely examining public reaction to a single notorious case: the victimization of Hedda Nussbaum. A final chapter answers in detail the question “What can we do?” It offers invaluable practical tips and resources for professionals in the law, criminal justice, health care, mental health, social services, public policy, and research, and for individuals concerned about family members and friends.
Stephanie Doty
Women’s Issues Matter
August 11, 2014
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0
