Equality with a Vengeance: Men's Rights Groups, Battered Women, and Antifeminist Backlash

Equality with a Vengeance: Men's Rights Groups, Battered Women, and Antifeminist Backlash, by Molly Dragiewicz. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2011. 154pp. $26.00 paper. ISBN: 9781555537395.

Since the mid-1970s and 1980s, men's rights organizations like the National Coalition of Free Men have challenged feminist organiz- ing on behalf of survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence. These groups have claimed that funding for women's shelters discriminates against men who, they assert, are equally (though less visibly) victimized by gender-based violence. In Equality with a Vengeance, Molly Dragiewicz examines one such case, Booth v. Hvass (2000), a legal suit brought by three men's rights groups against the state of Minnesota, that aimed to eliminate the dispersal of public funds for battered women's shelters and services.

Booth, which was eventually dismissed in 2001 by the U.S. District Court, is a useful case study in Dragiewicz's hands. She argues convincingly that such men's rights groups' attempts to impose gender-blind understandings of domestic violence in the name...