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Femicide: The Politics Of Women Killing
Jill Radford and Diana Russell, eds. Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992, paper $14.95.
Femicide is a collection of articles, mostly reprinted, addressing the "misogynist killing of women by men." In the introduction, Radford and Russell suggest that femicide, one end of the continuum of violence against women, is not widely recognized as the significant problem that it is. They compare the awareness and understanding of femicide today to that of rape and domestic violence 20 years ago. In developing this volume, the authors hope to contribute to the understanding of an organized resistance to femicide (similar to the resistance which has developed against rape and domestic violence).
This volume is overwhelming. Often, I found myself unable to read more than one article a day, and, even at that slow pace, I was barely able to think about the terrible and sweeping evidence of the war being waged on women in a misogynistic world.
The book is divided into six thematic parts, each containing five to eight articles, plus a brief introduction. The authors of individual articles deal with femicide in three different countries: The United Kingdom, the United States, and India. The intersection of race and class with femicide is also addressed. Part 1 explores historical themes: witch burning in Europe, historical evidence for wife murders in England, for the legal execution of lesbians because of their lesbianism, for the lynching of women in the United States, and for suttee in India (the practice of burning or burying women alive with their dead husbands). The final article of the historical section, "Female Genocide," attempts to make a case for the nearly universal practice of female infanticide, neglect, and abuse. The sweeping generalizations, shallow treatment of individual examples, and generally polemical tone of this piece are in sharp contrast to the other selections in the book.
Next, the editors focus on the murder of women in their homes and present a compelling and well-chosen mix of articles discussing motives, statistics, societal responses to domestic murders, and specific examples of murders. The discussion of motives, which includes male sexual "proprietariness," the "reasonable man standard" used in English as well as U.S. law, and the...